The use of social media like Twitter and Facebook to organize Iranian protestors and broadcast news to the outside world is a testament to the potential for social media to break through a repressive regime’s media iron curtain. There is a wealth of real-time reporting, and aggregating of this information using social media tools online today.

Still, too much of the Stateside chatter online in the past 48 hours has treated the protests as an opportunity for social media cheerleading. Sites like ReadWriteWeb, Mashable and Gawker appear primarily interested in slapping the wrists of the American MSM while using the protests as a case study validating their pet talking points about the irrelevancy of old-school media, the world-changing potential of social media, and all the usual harangues. This is all spiced with a touch of vicarious protest pr0n from bloggers, Twitterers and the like, perhaps rueful that we don’t have a bloody riot of our own to gape at.

The protests are newsworthy, with global implications, and the MSM has been largely terrible in its coverage, with the exception of generally excellent news sources such as the BBC and the New York Times’ Lede blog. But if the protests themselves demonstrate the potential of social media, much of the ensuing Stateside Internet’s chatter demonstrates all of its excesses—using real world strife to validate one’s own cause, taking a vicarious thrill from cheap shock tactics (there’s a car-accident-gaping quality to the enthusiasm with which people are linking to camera-phone photos of bloody protestors), amplified via the self-congratulatory social media echo chamber.

The instances aren’t exact analogues, but where were ReadWriteWeb and Mashable and Gawker et al last fall during the RNC protests, during which activists used Twitter, Facebook, etc to organize and document instances of police brutality and First Amendment violations that the MSM had no interest in? The social media punditry’s response to the protests were to damn the activists with faint praise, outright mock them, or otherwise ignore and/or dismiss.

In one case, social media is cutting through a repressive regime’s media lockdown, in the other case, social media acts as a corrective to corporate media’s lack of interest. A huge difference of scale and intention, absolutely. I suspect something else is at play, though: for one, Iranian protests are more exotic and thrilling. Secondly, social media punditry, so afraid of undermining SEO as it ever-desperately trolls for more page hits, is loath to cover anything domestic that could be considered partisan. Twitter-broadcasted protesting in Iran is safe for Americans to cheerlead; congratulating CodePink for using Twitter is potentially partisan.

This isn’t a blanket dismissal. For example, this tweet from Dan Sinker, who is asking for people to provide @persiankiwi with technical support uploading video—there are many examples, like this, of Stateside social media pundits using their knowledge and audiences to provide what nominal support they can to the protestors. But griping about CNN’s loathsome coverage to prove a point is not a corrective to missed reportage; cheerleading Twitter while Iranians risk life and limb to protest a fixed election is the worst kind of self-serving masturbatory exercise for Americans safe behind their laptops, covetously wracking up page hits. Come six months, one group may be serving life prison terms in Iranian jail; the other group will be collecting handsome speaking fees talking about the importance of social media in the wake of the ‘09 Iranian election.