My stolen face

Not mine really, Neda Soltani's:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20267989

I came across this article on the BBC news website, and it's very disturbing.

The gist of it is that a woman was shot dead during a demonstration in Tehran in 2009 who had the same name as the women in the article. No information about her was made available by the authorities, so journalists and bloggers tried to find her on Facebook by a process of elimination.

They used this Neda's picture without permission and she suddenly became a symbol of Iranian resistance. When she tried to explain the mistake, she received hate messages from people who thought she had hacked into the Facebook account and was trying to destabilise their campaign.

The article goes on to explain the huge negative impact this had on her life. It made me realise how important our role as keepers of truth is for people like Neda, who are denied a voice even though they are screaming to be heard. The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence even tried to use the situation to claim that the other Neda's death had not happened. An opportunity for them to re-write history.

I think this shows the importance of preserving evidence of the past so that it cannot be expunged by those who don't want to see it, as well as the importance of striving for impartiality in order to give everyone a fair opportunity to learn from history.