Twitter and Iran

Most people have heard that activists in the Iranian Revolution are using Twitter. But how are they using Twitter?

Some (Clay Shirky , Lev Glossman, Mark Ambinder) argue that Twitter is helping organize protest.

Others (Evgeny Morozov, Daniel Terdiman, Marshall Kirkpatrick) argue that Twitter isn't playing a role in organizing protests, rather it is being used to engage the international media.

It remains to be seen what role Twitter did or is or will play in Iran, but it will certainly be interested to see.

In the meantime, some visualizations of Twitter Iran-related terms:

ReadWriteWeb says that, "At its peak, a search for "Iran" on Twitter generated over 100,000 tweets per day and over 8,000 tweets per hour."

In this series of bandwidth plots, the relative volumes of different Iran-related phrases on Twitter over time are shown.

This is a visualization of the re-tweeting in a network map. "Its structure shows a very different phenomenon, capturing the emergence not of a community but of an elite. Despite massive interest, or perhaps because of it, most people did not discover more than one of the top Iranians. The network simply grew faster than the information could naturally propagate. But a small inner circle did succeed in identifying core sources of information."