Is it possible for hackers to shut down fan pages on facebook?

[BobcatRed]

It's possible, though I can't account for the likelihood. Since the Iranian government has the power to filter the internet in their country, that means they likely also have the ability to watch web traffic on the internet from their country. Since facebook's login isn't necessarily encrypted, all they would have to do is wait for the maintainer to log in and capture the login information (it wouldn't take an exceptionally skilled hacker to do this.) They could then log on and pull the fan page down.

On the other hand, Facebook may want to prevent the Iranian government from blocking the site (and costing them users) so they might pull the pages down to appease the Iranian government.

Or, the people who are maintaining these pages are under pressure from the government, and may be pulling them down themselves to avoid or reduce backlash from the government.

Or the people maintaining those fan pages were overwhelmed by the response and didn't want to deal with it anymore. I'm sure they got both positive and negative feedback.

While I'll admit that the Iranian government is more likely to try and interfere with anti-government content on the web than many other countries, there's really no way to say if that's what is actually happening in the case of these three fanpages.