China’s online community brimmed with disappointment - if not despair - on Tuesday after online media reported that Iran had granted its citizens access to Facebook and Twitter. Both sites had been walled off from Iranian users since 2009. This leaves China, along with its neighbour North Korea, among the very few countries which still block Facebook and Twitter. “Iranians are now returning to Facebook, yet we Chinese haven't even met Facebook,” one microblogger commented on Weibo.

Almost every major political figure has a social-media presence today. Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov is an Instagram addict, as is Syria’s first family. Hugo Chavez was a prolific tweeter, and Fidel Castro blogs occasionally. Iowa senator Chuck Grassley live-tweets University of Northern Iowa Panthers women’s volleyball matches. Yet nobody’s quite as strange as Iran’s Supreme Tweeter, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks are back online in Iran. It’s been four years since the government shut off access to most social media during protests following the 2009 presidential elections. But a new administration, elected in June, has vowed to improve communications in Iran and liberalize access to the internet. President Hassan Rouhani is himself on Twitter.

A hardline backlash always looms large over any attempt by a new government in Tehran to present itself as one that the West can talk to. President Hassan Rouhani has already found that the greatest challenge to public diplomacy is an apparent lack of discipline, rather than a lack of influential allies or favourable laws in a country where Facebook and other social networks are banned but not illegal.

When contemplating the logistics of a possible war with Iran, it is helpful to consult maps indicating the multitude of US military bases that already encircle a country under crippling economic sanctions. No similar visual aids are available for Iranian bases in the vicinity of the US, for obvious reasons.However, there are various ways to compensate for the lack of an apparent Iranian threat in the western hemisphere. One is to blame it on "invisibleness".

Iran is a close ally of Syria, so officials in Tehran are following the Syrian conflict closely. But so are ordinary Iranians, who worry that the crisis could distract their government from pressing matters at home, like the economy. Anchor Marco Werman discusses Iran’s reaction to events in Syria with Iranian journalist Shirin Jaafari.

Fars News Agency, the state-run Iranian news outlet famous for picking up an Onion story and presenting it as news, has apparently decided that plagiarizing satirical articles isn't brazen enough. On Thursday, the news agency's editors reprinted a Foreign Policy article on the debate over chemical weapons in Syria.

Signaling a possible thaw in long-frozen relations, the Obama administration and the new leadership in Iran are communicating about Syria and are moving behind the scenes toward direct talks that both governments hope can ease the escalating confrontation over Tehran's nuclear program.