LONDON - International media said Wednesday they were skirting the ban on reporting from the streets of Iran by using a flood of emails, Twitter messages and phone calls from people inside the country.

Iranian authorities accused some foreign media of being the "mouthpiece of rioters" Wednesday in the wake of demonstrations by supporters of the defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who wants a fresh election.

So with foreign media now barred from taking to the streets to report on the aftermath of the disputed election, heavy use is being made of so-called user-generated content.

Alongside reports compiled from correspondents in Iran -- often under false names -- newspapers and websites are reprinting emails, the contents of phone calls, and messages from Twitter and social networking site Facebook.

The BBC's London-based Persian service, which is banned from having a correspondent in Iran, is getting more than 4,000 emails and hundreds of phone calls from Iran every day.

Having carefully analysed the content for reliability, it is broadcasting it back to a wider audience in Iran.

Sadeq Saba, a senior analyst at BBC Persian, said: "We are receiving videos, we are receiving emails, phone calls and text messages, not only from Tehran from other cities around the country. So we get a picture of what is happening outside of Tehran."

Saba said he had been speaking to a "reliable source" in the Iranian city of Rasht earlier Wednesday.

"He was telling me that every day, people have been gathering to demonstrate and demand the annulment of the election, which has become a national demand for Mousavi's supporters.

"But he also told me that the Basiji (pro-government militia) are going into certain parts of the city causing fear and some of them are armed.

"They are a really feared institution and that is one of the reasons that the demonstrations are not as large as they might have been."

Like many international media organisations, The Times newspaper sent a correspondent to cover last Friday's elections but he had to leave the country when his 10-day visa expired on Monday.

Foreign editor Richard Beeston told AFP: "Since then, we've had two or three people working for us, foreigners and Iranians.

"We are not using their real names because the authorities have made it very clear that they will be arrested or have their accreditation taken away."

But he acknowledged that it was becoming "harder and harder to operate normally".

The Times also has a London-based Iranian monitoring Twitter and Facebook.

"We are very aware that opponents of the regime will be putting out material that is uncheckable and possibly propaganda. Where possible, we just run quotes from people we have actually spoken to ourselves," Beeston said.

The amount of user-generated material used looks set to rise as foreign journalists find it increasingly difficult to operate in Iran.

The Los Angeles Times wrote Wednesday: "The Middle East is witnessing Iran slip into a guerrilla-style Internet and Twitter game of strategies and slogans pecked out by protesters attempting to outflank a government that has largely shut down communication outlets ..."

Journalists from privately-owned Italian TV channel 5 will head home this week after their accreditation runs out.

News editor Luca Rigatoni said: "Up until Tuesday they managed to send their reports, albeit with difficulty. But on Tuesday afternoon their mobile phone didn't work all afternoon and they couldn't use the phone in their hotel bedroom because they feared they would be listened to."

Julien Colombani, deputy foreign editor of state-owned France 3 television, said the journalist and his team the channel sent to Tehran are not allowed to film.

"They can only work in their office. The Iranian state is controlling the broadcasting of pictures and telephone links," Colombani said.

Back in Britain, Sky News television is using content from Twitter to complement the coverage from its foreign editor, who is in the Iranian capital.

Ruth Barnett, a multimedia producer on the channel, admitted that it is difficult to check who the Twitter users are.

"But what we feel we've been able to do is isolate people that we think are pretty reliable -- either because things that they have said have been corroborated by other sources or our own information, or because they were already established as Iranian tweeters ahead of time," she told AFP.

AFP’s office in Tehran is subjected to the same media restrictions as other foreign media.