a revolution in 140 characters reflecting on the role of social networking technologies in the 2009...

A Revolution in 140 Characters? Reflecting on the Role

of Social Networking Technologies in the 2009 Iranian

Post-Election Protests

Philipp S. Mueller and Sophie van Huellen

The 2009 post-election protests in Tehran in Iran are colloquially referred to as the “Twitter

revolution.” Mainstream public opinion assumed that the use of social media, such as Facebook,

Flickr, YouTube, and especially Twitter, significantly affected the evolution and outcome of the

revolutionary collective action. This paper analyzes the Iranian case to look at the effect of such

many-to-many media on power structures in society. Two analytical approaches—the power-shift

and the media-shift perspective—are offered as possible heuristics to frame the complex interplay of

media and revolutionary politics. Analyzing empirical findings on Iran’s Web demography,

censorship mechanisms, the protests’ organization and the Western mass media’s reaction, we find

that social media played a decisive role in raising international awareness by transforming the

agenda-setting process of the Western mass media. However, they turned out to be of lesser

relevance for the protests’ progress in overthrowing the regime. A change in the mediascape does not

automatically imply a changed powerscape, at least not in 2009 Tehran.

KEY WORDS: social media, revolution, Iran, twitter, protest, collective action

Introduction

Two hours after the polls closed on June 12, 2009, the Iranian Islamic Republic

News Agency announced the re-election of the incumbent President Mahmoud

Ahmadinejad with a majority of 63 percent. Shortly thereafter, the supporters of

Iran’s opposition, especially those of Ahmadinejad’s rival candidate Mir-Hossein

Mousavi, initiated a protest movement to dispute the election results. The

protesters’ actions were soon referred to as Iran’s “Twitter revolution” by Western

commentators. This was motivated by the observation that demonstrators made

use of new social media Web technologies, including Facebook, Flickr, YouTube—

and especially Twitter—in a twofold manner: not only did online social media

serve as a tool to organize and coordinate protests, they also played a decisive role

in raising awareness about the demonstrations in the international public sphere.

Foreign media outlets relied on the information, pictures, and videos posted by

Iranian protesters on Twitter and Facebook, especially after the Iranian regime

Policy & Internet, Vol. 4, No. 3-4, 2012

184

1944-2866 # 2012 Policy Studies Organization

Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX42 DQ.

deterred news correspondents and journalists in Iran from producing their own

content.The interaction of Web technologies, mass media, and politics confronts us

with a not well-understood form of revolutionary collective action, with commenta-

tors split between describing social media as an emancipatory agent, or a

dangerous disillusionment (Morozov, 2011).

We cannot imagine the twenty-first century mediascape without such many-

to-many media (Shirky, 2009), but it is not clear how (or if) they can change

existing power structures. Therefore, it is necessary to ask two questions: first,

“do many-to-many media have the potential to play a significant role in

challenging existing power relations?” If this contention proves well founded one

can proceed to ask: “how do many-to-many media change power structures in

society?” These questions are relevant not only to better understand what actually

happened in Iran in 2009, but to understand collective action in a world in which,

according to Castells (2009), traditional mass media have lost the monopoly of

making sense of our worlds. The latest political upheavals across many Arab

nations in 2011–12, conventionally subsumed under the “Arab Spring” label show

clearly that we need to better understand the interplay of many-to-many media

and revolutionary politics.

Historical and Theoretical Context

The Iranian protesters were not the first to utilize social media to organize

and amplify their voices. Social media already had played important roles during

the 2005 French banlieues riots, the 2006 youth riots in Budapest, the Zimbab-

wean opposition uprising in 2008 (Nyaira, 2009), and the 2004 Ukrainian Orange

Revolution when flashmobs, organized via SMS, and discussion boards contribut-

ed to its success (Goldstein, 2007; Shirky, 2009). Further, Twitter was used

massively by protesters during the Greek riots in late 2008, and the spread of

sympathy worldwide among the Internet community triggered solidarity protests

in many European cities. This impact at the international level has caused

scholars to talk about the rise of a new global phenomenon: “networked protest”

(Morozov, 2008); a notion that describes an opposition movement for which the

Internet is valued as being crucial for its occurrence and persistence. Social

networking technologies are involved in many of today’s social movements

(Kirkpatrick, 2010), and seem to transform traditional modes of protest politics,

with many-to-many media enabling a new form of collective action (Castells,

2010). However, what is missing from existing studies is a persuasive framework

to describe the interplay between traditional media, social media, and power

relations in society. This is what we hope to accomplish in this article. We use the

2009 Iranian election protests as a case study to develop a general framework that

allows us to understand this interplay of media and politics. We offer two

guiding hypotheses for the analysis of such cases: the power-shift hypothesis and

the media-shift hypothesis.

The power-shift hypothesis assumes that many-to-many social media will

empower the actors who use them. The notion of power itself is, in reference to

Mueller/van Huellen: The Role of Social Networking Technologies 185

Max Weber’s definition, understood here as the ability of a social actor to enforce

their will, even against the will of other actors. To better understand the

interaction of many-to-many media and traditional power relations, we differenti-

ate between two relevant power patterns: “coercive power” (Weber, 1978) and

“structural power” (cf. Foucault’s or Castells’s notion of power through

“discourse”; Castells, 2010; Foucault, 1972). Coercive power is caused by a

superiority based on material advantages of one actor over another: power can be

exercised either by physical violence or the threat thereof. Structural power is the

fixing of power relations through institutions by which some social actors

dominate others (Castells, 2010). Rather than using force, structural power is

legitimized by meaning, constructed in the public sphere by those under

domination (Habermas, 1989). The construction of meaning arises through

communication, with the power to influence the meaning and value-defining

process (“agenda power”). The ability to control social media (and the construc-

tion of meaning) should therefore lead to changes in agenda-setting and

institutional power arrangements (Castells, 2010; Kirkpatrick, 2010; Lessig, 2008;

Post, 2009).

The media-shift hypothesis assumes that the Internet, and more specifically

the mainstreaming of many-to-many media, such as blogging, collaborative

editing, and social networking, has changed how we produce and consume

information at all levels (Benkler, 2006; Grewal, 2008; Shirky, 2009). However, we

do not claim here that many-to-many media is superseding mass media (Benkler,

2006), but rather that it is entering a complex interplay with mass media, where it

is substantially impacting the media cycle (Lehman-Wilzig & Cohen-Avigdor,

2004), but not automatically altering social power relations.

Traditional mass media is exclusively broadcast media, that is, one-to-many

media, where direct feedback is impossible (Lasswell, 1948).1 In many-to-many

media, the emitter and the recipient coincide, theoretically allowing for the

empowerment of new social actors. However, the reality is more complicated, as

media production in a networked realm can take on a variety of forms: it can

include “information broadcasting,” that is, sent from one-to-many (e.g., blogging,

micro-blogging), it can be a “conversation” between many (a forum or social

networking), or it can be a “project,” that is, collaboratively produced by many,

and broadcast thereafter (e.g., Wikipedia, Indymedia, Ushahidi). The difference

between “conversations” and “projects” is that socially produced conversations

do not generally intend to generate a common project, while collaborative

production often focuses on the output of the collaboration. While both

“conversations” and “projects” are naturally exclusive to many-to-many media,

as actors within the network produce media for other actors within the network

(Breakenridge, 2008; Kelly, 1998; Monge & Contractor, 2003), “broadcasting” can

take place on many-to-many or one-to-many platforms (television, radio, print).

Considering these three communication patterns that are observable in social

media production, it is obvious that they are closely embedded in the traditional

channels of mass media. Thus the media-shift hypothesis reminds us that the use

of a different type of media does not automatically entail a power shift: while

186 Policy & Internet, 4:3-4

social media technologies indeed introduce a new “mediascape,” they do not

necessarily introduce a new “powerscape.”

The Case: A Revolution in 140 Characters

The Internet in Iran

In 2009, at the time of the Iranian post-election upheavals, 23 million of the

66 million Iranians had access to the Web (CIA, 2009). With 35 percent of its

population online, Iran has far more Internet users than its neighbors

(Corley, 2009). Interestingly, they have the thirteenth largest Internet community

in total users while they only hold 133rd place in the worldwide ranking

regarding the number of available Internet hosts (CIA, 2009). With such a huge

demand served by only a small number of suppliers, the Internet hosting service

is highly centralized in the hands of a few, which is convenient for any kind of

censorship and surveillance to take place.

About three million Iranian blogs exist (Schams, 2009), of which 60,000 are,

according to Kelly and Etling (2008), frequently updated. This large discussion

space is not solely used by the stereotypically young, democratic critics of the

current regime. Among the four major network groups clustered in Iran’s

“blogosphere map” (Figure 1), both the “Secular/Reformist” and the “Conservative/

Figure 1. The Iranian Blogosphere.Note: Node size reflects the number of inbound links from other blogs; nodes are colored according to

what they link to over a long period of time. An interactive version is available online.Source: Berkman Center (2009).


Religious” group can be classified as “Internet activists,” however, on very

different political sides (Hill & Hughes, 1998, p. 14). Together those Internet

activists occupy more than half of Iran’s blogosphere, cover a wide range of

political opinions and topics. Bloggers in these categories are more likely to be

male and young (students and young adults between 18 and 35), and many of

them blog anonymously (Hill & Hughes, 1998). With over 40 million Iranians

under the age of 35, more than half of whom are men, this potential cyber-society

represents a huge portion of Iran’s total population. As many newspapers cease

publication, young Iranians are using the Internet as an alternative space for a

civil society, reflecting the wide range of the extremely varied interests, political

and apolitical opinions, and hopes of the younger generation (Schams, 2009).

However, it is obvious that although a great number of Iranians have access to

the Internet and to the above-mentioned social network a striking number of

citizens are still excluded, due either to a lack of technologies or a lack of

knowledge (Alavi, 2009).

According to the Open Net Initiative (ONI)’s 2006/2007 report, Iranian

Internet users face one of the world’s most comprehensive and sophisticated

filtering systems (ONI, 2009). The legal and institutional basis for this system of

filtering and censorship was put in place through various decrees issued by the

Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution in December 2001 (ONI, 2009). Today

the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG), the Ministry of Intelligence

and National Security, and Tehran’s Prosecutor General (Saeed Mortazavi at the

time of the 2009 uprising) are in charge of filtering methods and deciding which

websites should be banned (ICTRC, 2005).

The legal structures for enforcing speech restrictions in Iran such as the Press

Law of 1986 (Pars Times, 1986) form the foundation for regulation of the Iranian

media, and now the Internet. The law was expanded in April 2009 in order to

apply also to domestic news sites and websites and is implemented through four

different techniques: the employment of a centralized filter blocking certain

domains, content filtering methods, surveillance, and bandwidth restriction.

According to the latest ONI research on Iranian censorship (ONI, 2009), Iran

has further developed its filtering technology toward a centralized and govern-

ment-controlled filtering regime. Data traffic traveling into or out of Iran is

filtered by centralized gateways, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) proxy servers

(ONI, 2009). In 2008, Iran blocked access to more than five million Internet sites,

and in recent years, commercial ISPs—which are forced to apply filtering

methods by the MCIG—have been instructed to block access to political, human

rights and women’s rights sites, various news sites, as well as social networking

sites such as Facebook and YouTube (ONI, 2009). The structural (institutional)

power executed by the Press Law of 1986, in combination with coercive power,

enforced through the various filtering methods implemented, puts a high

pressure on Iran’s Internet users.

In July 2009, a month after the presidential elections, the Iranian parliament

ratified a further law to monitor cyberspace. Officially it aimed to reduce

cybercrime and to secure Internet users’ privacy, however, the law required ISPs


to store their customers’ data traffic for up to three months, so that in the case of

suspicious actions the client could be detained in the name of national security.

At the time of the protests, Tehran’s Prosecutor General not only disposed more

stringent censorship techniques and laws but also ordered harsh actions against

journalists and Internet activists. Reporters Sans Frontieres noted cases of torture,

arrests, and murder (Reporters Without Borders [RSF], 2009b). Additionally,

the Iranian Revolutionary Guard2 actively enforced the Internet content

standards, creating an atmosphere of fear among Internet activists and promoting

self-censorship (RSF, 2009b). Iran also instituted an explicit cap on Internet access

speeds for households, at 128 kilobytes per second (Sullivan, 2009).

This combination of a priori preventive filters and bandwidth restriction and

a posteriori strict law enforcement grounds the effectiveness of one of the world’s

most comprehensive and sophisticated Internet censorship schemes (Faris &

Villeneuve, 2008). Even if circumvention is possible, the government’s surveil-

lance and blocking efforts have imposed serious impediments for Internet users

within Iran as well as for academic research, as the reliability and origin of

primary sources is often open to doubt.

Iranian Politics

The founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran at the end of the Islamic

Revolution in 1979 marked a turning point for Iranians. Before the revolution,

Iran was a constitutional monarchy with a partly open society under the regime

of the late Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. With his Westernization and

modernization policy, the Shah alienated himself from the poor in rural Iran—the

majority of his citizens—and increasingly also from Iran’s intelligentsia, who

were widely unsatisfied with their limited possibility to influence political

decisions, and with the economic threat of inflation. Meanwhile, the radical clergy

under the leadership of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini provided a theory of an

alternative state and spoke in a language understandable to the great masses of

the urban areas (Kamali, 1998). “Khomeinism” provided an ideology different to

nationalism and socialism, and the radical clergy re-orientated themselves in a

modern society and adapted to modern but decisively non-Western concepts,

which provided them support and legitimacy also among Iran’s intelligentsia.

As Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi wrote in 2006, the unfolding

revolution hypnotized the modern and well-educated citizens. However, the

main support came from the “dispossessed,” a class that had been widely ignored

by the Shah’s regime. Under his charismatic leadership, Khomeini united major

parts of the regime’s opposition and with the military support of his Revolution-

ary Guard (an ideologically driven branch of Iran’s military), he eventually

overthrew the Shah. Since then, Iran has been an Islamic state under the Sharia

law. Liberal students and professionals soon realized the scope of their error in

their understanding of the revolution Khomeini had designed (Ebadi, 2006).

When the reformer Mohammad Khatami was elected president in 1997, the

“Tehran Spring” (Ebadi, 2006) promised to bring about a relaxation of the


suppression of freedom of speech. This belief turned out to be misplaced, and

student protests at Tehran University in 1999 and 2003 were brutally suppressed

by the police and the Basij.3 With the inauguration of conservative hardliner and

former mayor of Tehran Mahmud Ahmadinejad in 2005, hopes for a relaxation of

the Islamic system were dashed. In the subsequent presidential election in 2009,

the reformist politician and former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was the

promising opposition candidate, enjoying a high popularity among liberals and

the younger generation, especially students. After his quickly declared defeat by

the incumbent president Ahmadinejad, he claimed the election was rigged and

thousands of his followers started protesting in the streets of Tehran.

A Twitter Revolution?

The protests in Iran began on Saturday, June 13, 2009. The day before,

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been declared the winner of the 2009 Iranian

presidential elections, only a few hours after the close of the polling stations. The

supporters of Iran’s opposition, especially those of Ahmadinejad’s rival candi-

dates Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karrubi, suspected electoral fraud by the

Iranian regime and therefore initiated demonstrations in order to challenge the

official results of the election.

At first, the Western mass media failed to report on the protests (Cohen,

2009). However, via online social media, including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and

YouTube, Internet users in Iran provided information about the protests,

including photos and videos, so that the global networked public sphere could

observe the events (Cohen, 2009; Economist, 2009; Stocker, Neumann, & Dorting,

2009). Consequently, Internet users in Western countries questioned the delay in

mass-media coverage of the demonstrations: CNN, for example, was accused of

reacting to the events too late (Cohen, 2009; Economist, 2009).

Both before and after the election, the Iranian government tried to close down

all communication channels in order to keep protesters from organizing on the

streets, as well as to isolate the opposition from the outside world. Personal

blogging domains on Blogspot.com and other hosting services were made

unavailable (ONI, 2009).4 Additionally, official websites created for the election

campaign, including www.yaarinews.ir—which was designed for the former

president Mohammad Khatami, a leading reformist figure who dropped out of

the election race in favor of Mousavi and Karrubi—and websites of the reformist

coalition such as www.baharestaniran.com, were shut down (ONI, 2009). Access

to social networking sites was denied throughout the election period as well as

afterward, as the opposition was believed to be using them to mobilize their

supporters. Similarly, international, independent Persian and Western media

websites, mainly those with English content, were banned, among them

Al-Arabia, Balatarin, Global Voices, the Huffington Post, and the New York Times

(ONI, 2009). Moreover, during and soon after the election, the mobile phone

service was cut off frequently (The Atlantic, 2009). Communication via cell

phones or short messages was impossible or at least difficult, so that people had


to switch to word of mouth to inform each other about rallies. Despite this strong

coercive power executed by the regime, some protesters somehow managed to

circumvent the restrictions, which caused floods of cell phone video clips and

news about the brutal crackdown in Tehran’s streets being broadcast over the

Web, triggering an international solidarity movement. Social networking tools

seemed to play a major role in organizing the protests despite the restrictions,

and were used to circulate advice about breaking the government’s censorship.

The question about the interplay between Web technologies and the “Twitter

revolution” can be observed through two lenses: the power-shift and the media-

shift hypotheses. The power-shift hypothesis assumes that technologies empower

the masses and therefore lead to revolution. The media-shift hypothesis assumes

that technologies impact how political acts are perceived in the traditional

Western mass media and change the nature of mass communication, but not

automatically the existing “powerscape.” Let us examine them one by one.

The Power-Shift Hypothesis

The power-shift hypothesis holds that the use of Web technologies empowers

the masses and therefore reshapes the political reality. This implies, in the Iranian

case, that Web technologies significantly influenced the outcome of the “revolu-

tion.” In other words, the power to create meaning and thereby to challenge the

regime’s legitimacy was transferred to the crowd though use of new Web 2.0

technologies (Shirky, 2009). By this logic, the new agenda-setting power of the

masses challenges institutional power and eventually overcomes a regime’s

highly coercive power structure, leading to regime change.

However, revolutionary theory tells us that factors other than the emancipa-

tion or empowering of the masses might be relevant for a revolution’s success.

Recalling Goldstone (2001), the trigger in a revolutionary process is a public

perception that a regime is unjust. In the Iranian case, this condition was met by

the general perception that the election had been rigged. Goldstone (2001) further

explains that the interplay of a vanguard group, interpersonal networks, and a

cross-class coalition are pivotal elements for the development of a revolution; in

other words, the elite nucleus has to succeed in connecting with other popular

groups. For this linkage to occur, group structure must exist beforehand. In the

case of the 1979 Iranian revolution the “dispossessed” were successfully included

(Ebadi, 2006), and with his inclusive religious claim, revolutionary leader

Ayatollah Khomeini succeeded in gaining support across class structure.

In the more recent events, Facebook and other social network sites helped

their users to accumulate weak ties (Granovetter, 1983). Thus in the case of

organizing events, a large number of people could potentially be reached in a

short amount of time.5 However, whether a movement succeeds in mobilizing

cross-class groups is highly dependent on the a priori structure of the communica-

tion network used. Additionally, one has to take into consideration that Web tools

such as Twitter and Facebook hold the danger of exaggerating a movement’s

momentum (Schectman, 2009). As the possession of a smart phone or Internet


access is a prior condition for forming part of a social cyber-network, a

considerable number of Iran’s citizens are excluded ex ante. This to some extent

follows Castells’ (2000) argument, that network societies imply exclusion

mechanisms due to technological dependency (Stalder, 2006).

Another consideration for the mobilizing potential of cyber-networks, is that

the network has to be sustainable during the mobilization event in order to serve

as a reliable organization and communication tool. While this role of the Internet

has been assumed to be critical for the organization of protest in Iran by Western

societies,6 restricted Internet availability and censorship made some doubtful about

the relevance of social Web technologies during the 2009 post-election uprising.

Circumvention and Internet Activism

In 2006, Shirin Ebadi described the situation in Iran as being equivalent to the

post-revolution days in 1979, despite the fact that “information technology and

the Internet have made blackout censorship impossible” (Ebadi, 2006, p. 194); a

statement that expressed a hope in, and the importance of, new communication

technologies in Iran. Indeed, despite a strict censorship regime, Iran has a lively

Internet community that is eager and able to circumvent the government’s

blocking efforts (Berkman Center, 2009). During the June 2009 election and

especially during the post-election period, the Internet served as a tool for first

the political campaign of the opposition; second, the mobilization, coordination

and legitimation of antigovernment protests; and third, the spreading of

information outside Iran, triggering a worldwide solidarity movement. However,

the scope of influence of new communication technologies within Iran is difficult

to measure. In the following, we examine the opposition’s activities on Facebook

and Twitter during the post-election uprising in order to form a picture of Iran’s

Internet community.

Data traffic in Iran seeking a blocked destination has to take a route over

proxy servers (Boyle, 2009). If the Internet Protocol (IP) numbers are not on the

Iranian filtering system’s blocked list, any data traffic from Iran can pass through

these transit points. From there, the traffic can be forwarded to any destination.

During the post-election crisis, countless proxy servers popped up around the

world, with websites such AnonymousIran.com, Proxy.org, and Sesawe.net, all

offering random proxy in order to circumvent the state’s filtering system and

access blocked uniform resource locators (URLs). Notably, most of the ad hoc

proxy providers were generated by amateur activists, including exiled Iranians,

family friends, relatives, and peers worldwide without any previous ties to the

country and its political situation. Those set up proxy servers on their private

computers, many following instructions shared on Twitter using the hashtag

#iranelection proxy (Popkin, 2009). Without the international support from

activists outside Iran, circumvention would probably not have been possible to

the extent that it occurred.

Using the micro-blogging service Twitter makes it even easier to circumvent

censorship, as it is naturally independent from any fixed URL: whoever requests


the service of other Twitter users does not have to access a single website.

Although the Iranian government could block access to the Twitter domain or

individual Twitter feeds, tweets can be sent and received on a broad variety of

platforms, including cell phones, and websites such as Twitter Fox (Sullivan,

2009), Facebook, blogs, and Twitterfall (Zittrain, 2009). With the ability to use

Twitter via one’s cell phone through text messaging, microblogging does not even

require Internet access. This made it an optimal tool for censorship circumvention

in the case of the Iranian upheaval in 2009.

Thousands of Twitter users worldwide followed the post-election events in

Iran via tweets supposedly sent by political activists within Iran. The hashtag

#IranElection was the most requested and most active on Twitter for weeks

following the election (Twitterfall.com, 2009; TwitterStreamGraphs, 2009). How-

ever, many claim that the role of Twitter in the organization of protests was

highly overestimated. According to Mishra (2009) there were approximately

10,000 Twitter users in Iran before the election of whom fewer than 100 showed a

high activity during the post-election unrest. According to Sysmos.com (2009)

there were more than 20,000 Twitter users in Iran after the post-election uprising,

with the Iranian Twitter community experiencing a growth of almost 10 percent

in June 2009. An astonishing 93 percent of the Twitter users were reportedly

located in Tehran (Figures 2 and 3).

After the election, the proportion of tweets including the hashtag #IranElec-

tion being tweeted from within Iran, compared with those being tweeted from

outside, changed dramatically. The percentage of those originating in Iran

declined from over 51 to less than 23 percent, while those from outside grew

from 27 to 40 percent (Figures 4 and 5).7 Additionally, the content changed over the

course of the first week post-election. The word “Mousavi” was most frequently

Figure 2. Profile Creation Dates (Iranian Twitter Users).Source: Sysmos.com (2009).


used before, with strong associations with the words “freedom” and “vote.” A

week later the content had shifted to “Iran” with associations with “Mousavi,”

“protest,” and “Tehran” (Figures 6 and 7).

These changes in Twitter content and network structure could indicate

several processes triggered by the election’s results announced on June 13, 2009.

Firstly, Twitter activists were probably aware of the fact that the international

Twitter community was listening to them, so they added general key words such

no loca�on 21.62%not from Iran

from Iran 51.35%

Percent Tweets About Iran Elec�on

Figure 4. Location of Tweets Using the Hashtag “#IranElection” (June 11, 2009).Source: Sysmos.com (2009).

Shiraz 0.94%

Mashhad 0.83%Ray 0.78%

Tabriz 0.58%Isfahan 0.39%

Yemen 0.37%Karaj 0.33%Qom 0.28%

Tehran 93.03%

Top Iranian Ci�es

Figure 3. Declared Locations of Iranian Twitter Accounts, June 2009.Source: Sysmos.com (2009).


as “Iran” in their tweets to label them for people who are not deeply involved in

Iran’s politics (Figures 6 and 7). Second, the protesters in Tehran probably used

Twitter to organize events, at least initially. Simultaneously, users reported

protests as they happened. Through the multiplier effect of forwarding (i.e.,

retweeting) tweets, the number of people tweeting about the events in Iran

increased drastically—at least according to Twitter fall and other Twitter hosting

sides. Third, there were numerous activists requesting that people outside Iran

change their Twitter location to Tehran to mislead the government and hinder

their efforts to trace dissidents. This development made it increasingly difficult to

distinguish between those tweeting inside and those tweeting outside Iran

(Figures 2 and 3). This raised doubt about the role played by Twitter in

organizing protest on the streets of Tehran.

Moreover, although there were ways to bypass the government’s censorship,

this was not an easy task and hence only a few probably did so (Schectman,

2009). Thus it is likely that mobilization within Iran mainly happened through

more conventional communication channels, including text messaging and word

of mouth instead (Mishra, 2009; Schectman, 2009). This is because mobilization

through the strong and weak ties of everyday life appears to be much easier, less

risky, and thus more effective for organizing such huge protests as were observed

in Tehran’s streets (Schectman, 2009).

However, Twitter influenced the Western world’s perception of the protests

more than any other social media tool. The findings discussed above indicate that

those tweeting within Iran were well aware of this fact and that they geared their

messages toward a curious audience outside Iran’s borders (Figures 4 and 5). By

successfully circumventing government censorship—at least by some—the oppo-

sition movement presumably gained the impression of power over the regime;

and regardless of the extent to which this circumvention might have actually

no loca�on 35.79%

not from Iran 40.39%

from Iran 23.82%

Percent Tweets About Iran Elec�on

Figure 5. Location of Tweets Using the Hashtag“#IranElection” (June 19, 2009).Source: Sysmos.com (2009).


helped to organize protests, the solidarity movement triggered in the Western

world was an obvious evidence of their success. With this sense of empowerment,

they were probably more likely to feel strong enough to protest against the

government beyond the virtual space. Additionally, the solidarity from outside

Iran was an important source of legitimacy for the protesters. Hence, with

increased international awareness, protesters as well as Western commentators

might have tended to overestimate the scope of antiregime sentiments within

Iranian society and thus perceived the protests as representative of Iran’s citizens.

However, recalling Goldstone (2001), revolutionary mobilization and net-

working have to move beyond class structures, and thus must include the

majority of Iran’s citizens. While Twitter and other networking tools reached

successfully beyond Iran’s borders, it is doubtful if they also succeeded in

reaching a wider mass within.8 Furthermore, it is debatable to what extent the

content was actually produced within Iran. The shift in the content and the

Figure 6. Associations Between Major Twitter Discussions (June 11, 2009; One Day Beforethe Election).

Note: Shortly before the election, conversations gravitated around the presidential candidate Mousaviwith the strongest links to “Iran,” “freedom,” and “vote.” Links to Persian content were also strong,

indicating that debates were taking place mainly among Iranians.Source: Sysmos.com (2009).


striking extent of English tweets might hint at a great number of tweets being

sent from outside Iran. Indeed, the extraordinary rise of Twitter users located in

Tehran was to some extent caused by the eagerness of external sympathizers to

mislead the Iranian government (Figures 2 and 3). Considering the strict

censorship, and the effort and knowledge required for circumvention, Twitter

might have been big in Iran, but even bigger abroad, at least during the period of

the uprising.

Beside Twitter, Gheytanchi and Rahimi (2009) suggest that for Mousavi

Facebook also played a role, especially as a campaigning tool in the pre-election

period. Mousavi and other leading reformists, as well as the former president

Khatami, maintained Facebook pages where they built support against the

hardliner regime, posted their speeches and invited their followers to discuss

political issues. Via Facebook, the opposition party successfully organized

campaign events during the pre-election period. A search of Facebook in mid

Figure 7. Associations Between Major Twitter Discussions (June 19, 2009; Post-Election).Note: A few days after the election, major conversations coming from Iranian Twitter users involvedthe keywords “Iran,” which had the strongest links to “Mousavi,” “Tehran,” and “Protest.” This shiftrefers back to the protests taking place mainly in Tehran. It is notable that Persian content had beenfully displaced by English content, probably reflecting the awareness of Iranian activists of their

international audience.Source: Sysmos.com (2009).


July 2009 for “Mir Hossein Mousavi” or “Iran Election” resulted in 67 pro-

Mousavi groups and seven pro-Mousavi pages alone, with the most popular page

claiming over 110,000 “supporters.” Information given on the page was at the

time written in both Persian and English, with hundreds of people commenting

on Mousavi’s statements. The “Mir Hossein Mousavi ” page in

particular contained lively and informative content, the high level of Persian text

suggesting that it was used mainly by Iranians. Most of the page’s supporters

had Iranian names and wrote in Persian on their own profile pages. The

bookmarks of (inter alia) mousavi1388, MirTweets, and Mousavi facebook

revealed further activity on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and Ghalam-

News.ir—Mousavi’s official news webpage.

Mousavi certainly used these channels to communicate with his supporters,

however, his messages were not designed to organize protests but rather to

encourage his followers to continue with their resistance. Tweets like “Tonight &

tomorrow night we must be louder and clearer than ever before, chanting ‘Allahu

Akbar’ (God is great) from rooftops. #iranElection” or “I am prepared for

martyrdom, go on strike if I am arrested #IranElection” were some encouraging

ones. Only a few actually concerned protest organization, such as: “Please join

Mousavi, Khatami and Karoubi tomorrow at 4 pm from Enghelab Sq. to Azadi

Sq. in Tehran for a crucial green protest #IranElection.” Similar to the Twitter

findings, the dominance of English content is striking on all the social network

channels on which Mousavi was active. This could imply that Mousavi and his

supporters were aware of the interest of the global community in Iran’s possible

political change. Again, the support of a wide community outside Iran might

have been a source of legitimation and motivation.

Compiling the above findings, it is clear that Mousavi and the opposition

movement managed to communicate through various social network channels.

Even if the mass of information on protest organization was probably distributed

through more conventional channels like word of mouth and mobile phone

devices, communication between the opposition leader and his followers likely

traveled predominately through the Internet. Messages and speeches posted by

Mousavi and his confidants might have fueled and sustained the movement.

Additionally, protesters triggered an international solidarity movement through

messages, tweets, and images spread via Twitter, YouTube, Flicker, etc. This

might have led to an overestimation of the opposition’s power within Iran among

protesters as well as in the Western community, however, with support from

outside, the opposition gained a legitimacy it might otherwise have lacked.

However, this global mass mobilization probably failed to include the

majority of Iran’s citizens, given that the scope of the network predetermined the

potential of its agenda-setting power. Hence protesters gained institutional power

within the existing network, however, they did not reach beyond. In addition to

the heterogeneity of the network, the regime’s strong coercive and institutional

power further diminished the opposition’s scope. The cyber-network failed to

ride a revolution as it was not able to transcend class structure within Iran—a

necessary condition for a revolution’s success (Goldstone, 2001).


The Media-Shift Hypothesis

Communication in the twentieth-century mass-media culture is described as

being extremely centralized (Castells, 2000), with most of the power in the

communication process being concentrated in the hands of professional journal-

ists working for media companies, with other members of society only having a

limited opportunity to share their ideas, as least with a large audience (Benkler,

2006): this can be described as a one-to-many mediascape. In the process of mass

communication, the flow of information mainly follows the same direction: from

the sender, such as newspapers, radio, and television, to their audiences, the

members of society. This assumption also applies to probably the most prominent

model of generation of public attention for an issue: agenda-setting. Mass-media

audiences recognize the prioritization of issues in media outlets, and hence adopt

the media agenda of issues as their own agenda of socially relevant problems

(Rossler, 1999). Given the audience’s chance to influence the agenda of the media

is small (letters to the editor, calling in to the radio station), the agenda-setting

function is centralized and monopolized in the hands of the mass media (Rossler,

1999). The only nonmedia actors likely to have a significant influence on the

media agenda are the social elite, especially politicians and public relations agents

(Rossler, 1999). Ordinary audience members, by contrast, are supposed to be

passive consumers of mass media and the agendas constructed through them;

agenda-setting seems to be a centralized process, in which power is in the hand

of professional journalists, who decide upon the relevance of an issue making use

of journalistic working routines, for example, news values (Galtung & Ruge, 1965;

Schulz, 1976). Therefore, capturing the radio station is important for revolutionary

collective action.

In the field of international news production, considered here, the concentra-

tion of power is even stronger than in domestic news. The production of

international news in most media outlets depends strongly on the input of a few

international news agencies, who compete in a very small, almost monopolized

market (Franzke, 2000; Hafez, 2002; Hintz, 2000). Additionally, international news

agencies are in many cases dependent on official information published by

governments who, consequently, can exercise a strong control on exactly what

information leaves (or does not leave) a country. Hafez (2007, p. 36) describes the

resulting chain of high power concentrations in the communication of foreign

news as a “trickling down” of news from official foreign government communi-

ques to the mass-media audience at home.

Benkler (2006) describes the transformation of our mediascape from one-to-

many to many-to-many media in The Wealth of Networks. Benkler’s idea is that the

use of network technologies enables—particularly in the domain of information

and culture—a new mode of “peer production” that can replace traditional

industrial (and concentrated) mass-media production processes (Benkler, 2006):

the dynamic of many-to-many communication. Consequently, a new “networked

public sphere” will be established, in which communication processes are

structured much more democratically than in the mass-media public sphere,


because each person has a chance to make contributions and to state their ideas

and opinions, resulting in a greater diversity of publicly available information

(Benkler, 2006). Furthermore, despite the ease with which centralized mass media

can be controlled by authoritarian regimes, Benkler (2006) suggests that network

technologies can function as a tool to work around the control of information: it is

exceedingly difficult to fully shut down all communications on a network, in

particular if the communication process does not rely on static websites and

central servers.

Bilateral News Coverage

After attention had been attracted to the Iranian protesters in the global

public sphere through worldwide access to peer-produced content covering the

demonstrations, the amount of news coverage of the issue grew rapidly, both in

traditional mass media and on online social network platforms. However, the

Iranian government soon sharply restricted the work of foreign professional

journalists in Iran, so that they could no longer produce their own content, to the

extent that they were even expelled from the country (RSF, 2009a). Under the

conditions of traditional centralized production of mass-media information,

the Iranian government’s control over professional journalists would have caused

a near total media blackout in Iran, however, the regime was not able to control

the distributed content on social media platforms (Stelter & Stone, 2009). This

explains why Western media continued to have sources of information, such as

photos and videos documenting the protests, which enabled them to continue

their coverage of the demonstrations (Schectman, 2009). Photos of the Iranian

Basij paramilitary forces breaking into houses, destroying property and shooting

into crowds of people, as well as protesters on the streets of Tehran, were

published in classical mass-media outlets such as the Guardian, the BBC, the

Economist, CNN, and others. The international media also featured photos

showing members of paramilitary groups beating protesters with sticks. In this

context, the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young women whose dying moments

were filmed and spread on the Internet, raised attention, becoming a symbol of

the rebellion not only in Iran but also in the international news coverage.

Given that the networked public sphere was the first space where information

about the protests in Iran became available worldwide, networked peer produc-

tion played a significant role for globally calling attention to the demonstrations—

however the revolutionary politics played out in one-to-many or mass media: The

debate in the West about these events started online, and traditional mass media

reacted to the ongoing online discussions and public awareness of the issue

(including the criticism of a lack of reporting). Social media, particularly Twitter,

had the potential to play an important role in the agenda-setting of the Iranian

protests, because they distribute information in real-time (Stocker et al., 2009).

Peer production processes on social media are much faster than the mass-media

news cycle, and the creation of public awareness for particular issues has

accelerated.


Nevertheless, the Iran case provides evidence that mass-media journalists are

increasingly sensitive to conversations on the Web, given they followed the

demand of news coverage driven by the readers and producers of social media,

by adopting topics to the mass-media agenda. However, while members of

the public were able to set the news agenda by utilizing social media, YouTube

videos and tweets were often meant to broadcast information to a broader

audience without a direct feedback loop. Thus, social media production only had

a strong influence on traditional mass media as long as it was embedded in the

traditional news cycle. However, the media market is—like any other market—

driven by supply and demand. The stronger signaling power of the demand side

necessarily influences the supply side and thus influences the agenda-setting

process. Additionally, social media production also serves as a competitor,

supplying the market with an alternative source of news coverage. With this

doubly influential power, social news production essentially impacts the “creation

of relevance,” but does not take over sole control of setting the news agenda.

The mass media are just beginning to take into account the production of

relevance in the network public sphere when creating their own media agendas,

thus conceding a portion of their power and influence to the collective of

members of society online (Holler, Vollnhals, & Faas, 2008; Rossler, 1999). The

mass media still fulfilled its traditional function in the public debate on the

demonstrations in Iran, by informing those people who were not engaged in

social network newsgathering, and by carrying the information to large audiences

quickly. Furthermore, by reporting constantly on the Iranian issue and including

it in their news agenda, the mass media confirmed the relevance of the topic for

all members of society, not only for those in online networks. One could assume

that mass media thereby even strengthened attention on the topic in the online

public sphere. In addition, journalists were keen to reduce the vast amount of

unconfirmed information on the Internet in order to provide their audience with

the most accurate image of the situation as possible.

Considering the complex interplay between traditional news coverage and

social media news production, news agenda-setting power seems not to have

shifted to the realm of social media, but rather is increasingly driven by the

strong signaling power of peer-produced media. The Iran case reminds us that

social media has in no way superseded traditional mass media, but rather has

entered a complex mutual dependency in which the power of agenda-setting is

diversified.

Conclusion

Although the Iranian “Twitter revolution” was ultimately unsuccessful in

terms of overthrowing the regime, social networking technologies were relevant

in the motivation, perpetuation, and reinforcement of the political opposition

movement. By triggering an international solidarity movement, the resistance

gained a sense of legitimation, which probably strengthened protesters’ will and

augmented their agenda-setting capacity. Although the protests’ organization


mainly traveled via word-of-mouth—considering the high efforts necessary for

censorship circumvention, this was the much more convenient and effective

way—the opposition successfully utilized social networking technologies during

the election campaign and to motivate their supporters during the uprising that

followed. However, what led to the 1979 revolution’s success was surely the

support of the population’s majority, gained by a cross-class linkage that was

lacking in the 2009 social cyber-network. While social media did not lead to the

regime’s fall, it increased the antigovernment movement, especially abroad.

We are clearly confronted here with a complex rearrangement of existing

power structures and in need of frameworks that allow us to think these through

intelligently. The interplay between a mediascape, where many-to-many media

increasingly matter and the powerscape, where reaching many will always

matter, is difficult to untangle: the power-shift and media-shift hypotheses allow

us to structure this debate.

Dr. Philipp S. Mueller is a business development director at CSC, the IT service

provider, and teaches digital strategy and leadership at the Business School

(SMBS) of the University of Salzburg. He received his doctorate from Ludwig-

Maximilians-University, Munich and studied at Harvard and Georgetown. He

has published extensively on the transformative impact of digital networking

technologies on governance. His latest book Machiavelli.net: Strategy for Our Open

World was published in 2012 (in German).Sophie van Huellen is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the School of Oriental

and African Studies, University of London. She previously studied Political

Economics and Political Science at University of Erfurt and has a Master of

Science degree in Development Economics from the School of Oriental and

African Studies, University of London.

Notes

1. Although Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch (1974) argue that the recipients are not purely passive, butthat they gear media to their gratification, and hence actively make a choice among the mediaavailable, the feedback through the mass media’s demand site is indirect and only binary(consume/not consume).

2. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard was founded after the Iranian Revolution 1979. It is a militarygroup enforcing the law of the Sharia and controlling the Basij. Under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad itspower has also augmented in political, economic, and social fields (Ebadi, 2006).

3. The Basij-e Mostaz’afin (Basij) is a paramilitary militia founded by Ayatollah Khomeini during the1979 Iranian Revolution.

4. The quoted stats provided by the Iranian government to the International TelecommunicationUnion—used by ONI—have been challenged recently, as being overly exaggerated (see http://www.telna.ir/News/8119/Default.aspx).

5. Facebook, together with numerous dissident websites, was blocked during the pre-election period(ONI, 2009), hinting both at its popularity, and the government’s assumption of its usefulness to theopposition.

6. For example, the U.S. State Department asked Twitter’s managers to delay a scheduled maintenanceso that Iranians could continue to use the site (Palfrey, Etling, & Faris, 2009).

7. The remaining 22 and 37 percent of Twitter users tweeting about the uprising did not state theirlocation (Sysmos.com, 2009).


8. Considering that Iran’s population, especially the young generation, is not homogeneous (Alavi,2009; Kreile, 2009) as well as Iran’s blogosphere (Berkman Center, 2009)—two-thirds are pro regimeand closed, one-third are oppositional and highly connected with outside Iran—the network hasprobably failed to include major parts of Iran’s society.

References

Alavi, Nasrin. 2009. “Kinder der Revolution—Die iranische Blogosphare.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte49: 33–38.

Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.New Haven/London: Yale University Press.

Berkman Center. 2009. Interactive Persian Blogosphere Map [Online]. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2008/Mapping_Irans_Online_Public/interactive_blogosphere_map. Accessed July23, 2009.

Boyle, Alan. 2009. “How Iran’s Internet Works Cosmic Log [Online].” http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/06/18/1970353.aspx. Accessed June 20, 2009.

Breakenridge, Deirde. 2008. PR 2.0: New Media, New Tools, New Audiences. New Jersey: FT Press.

Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Rise of Network Society—The Information Age: Economy, Society and CultureVolume I. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publisher Ltd.

______. 2009. Communication Power. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

______. 2010. The Rise of the Network Society (2nd ed.)—The Information Age. Economy, Society, and CultureVolume I. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). 2009. “Middle East: Iran.” The World Factbook [Online]. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ir.html. Accessed July 18, 2009.

Cohen, Noam. 2009. “Twitter on the Barricades: Six Lessons Learned.” The New York Times [Online].http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/weekinreview/21cohenweb.html. Accessed June 21, 2009.

Corley, Anne-Marie. 2009. “The Web vs. the Republic of Iran.” Beta Technology Review (June) [Online].June 2009. http://beta.technologyreview.com/web/22893/page2/. Accessed July 20, 2009.

Ebadi, Shirin. 2006. Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope. New York: Random House.

Economist. 2009. “Twitter 1, CNN0.” The Economist.com [Online]. http://www.economist.com/world/mideast-africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id¼13856224. Accessed June 21, 2009.

Faris, Robert, and Nart Villeneuve. 2008. “Measuring Global Internet Filtering.” In Access Denied: ThePractice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, eds. Robert Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski,and Jonathan Zittrain. Cambridge: MIT Press, 5–27.

Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, ed. Sheridan Smith.New York: Pantheon Books.

Franzke, Michael. 2000. “Aber die Agenturen haben nichts gemeldet…: Das Problem, uber dieProbleme der ‘Dritten-Welt’ zu berichten.” In Neue Medien und Offentlichkeiten: Politik undTelekommunikation in Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerika: Band 1., ed. Stefan Brune. Hamburg: Schriftendes Deutschen Ubersee-Instituts Hamburg, 115–26.

Galtung, Johan, and Mari H. Ruge. 1965. “The Structure of Foreign News. The Presentation of theCongo, Cuba and Cyprus Crisis in Four Norwegian Newspapers.” Journal of Peace Research 2:64–91.

Gheytanchi, Elham, and Babak Rahimi. 2009. “The Politics of Facebook in Iran.” Open Democracy[Online]. http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/the-politics-of-facebook-in-iran. AccessedJuly 18, 2009.

Goldstein, Joshua. 2007. The Role of Digital Networked Technologies in the Ukrainian Orange Revolution.Berkman Center Research Publication, Volume 14/2007. Harvard: Harvard University.

Goldstone, Jack A. 2001. “Towards a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory.” Annual Review ofPolitical Science 4 (1): 139–87.


Granovetter, Mark. 1983. “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited.” Sociological Theory1: 201–33.

Grewal, David S. 2008. Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization. New Haven: Yale UniversityPress.

Habermas, Jurgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category ofBourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity.

Hafez, Kai. 2002. Die politische Dimension der Auslandsberichterstattung: Theoretische Grundlagen, Vol. 1.Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft.

______. 2007. The Myth of Media Globalization. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press.

Hill, Kevin A., and John E. Hughes. 1998. Cyberpolitics: Citizen Activism in the Age of the Internet.Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.

Hintz, Arne. 2000. “Global Media Concentration and the Rise of Alternative Media.” In Neue Medienund Offentlichkeiten: Politik und Telekommunikation in Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerika, Vol. 2, ed.Stefan Brune. Hamburg: Schriften des Deutschen Ubersee-Instituts Hamburg, 11–35.

Holler, Sebastian, Sven Vollnhals, and Thorsten Faas. 2008. “Focal Points und Journalisten:Bedingungen fur den Einfluß der Blogosphare?” In Kommunikation, Partizipation und Wirkungen imSocial Web: Grundlagen und Methoden: Von der Gesellschaft zum Individuum, eds. Ansgar Zerfaß,Martin Welker, and Jan Schmidt. Koln: Halem, 94–111.

Iran CSOs Training & Research Center (ICTRC). 2005. A Report on the Status of the Internet inIran [Online]. http://www.genderit.org/upload/ad6d215b74e2a8613f0cf5416c9f3865/A_Report_onInternet_Access_in_Iran_2_.pdf. Accessed July 20, 2009.

Kamali, Masoud. 1998. Revolutionary Iran: Civil Society and State in the Modernization Process. Suffolk:Ashgate Publishing Ltd.

Katz, Elihu, Jay G. Blumler, and Michael Gurevitch. 1974. “Utilization of Mass Communication by theIndividual.” In The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research, eds.Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz. Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 19–32.

Kelly, John, and Bruce Etling. 2008. “Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the PersianBlogosphere.” Berkman Center Research, Volume 2008-01. Harvard: Berkman Center Research.

Kelly, Kevin. 1998. New Rules for the New Economy. New York: Penguin.

Kirkpatrick, David. 2010. The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World.New York: Simon & Schuster.

Kreile, Renate. 2009. “Verliert die Islamische Republik die Jugend?” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 49:27–32.

Lasswell, Harold D. 1948. Power and Personality. London: W.W. Norton & Company.

Lehman-Wilzig, Sam, and Nava Cohen-Avigdor. 2004. “The Natural Life Cycle of New MediaEvolution. Inter-Media Struggle for Survival in the Internet Age.” New Media Society 6: 707–30.

Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York:Penguin (Non-Classics).

Mishra Gaurav. 2009. “Updated: The Irony of Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution.’” Gauravonomics.com [Online].http://www.gauravonomics.com/blog/the-irony-of-irans-twitter-revolution/. Accessed July 21,2009.

Monge, Peter R., and Noshir S. Contractor. 2003. Theories of Communication Networks. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2008. “The Alternative’s Alternative.” Opendemocracy.net (December 29) [Online].http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/the-alternatives-alternative. Accessed July 22,2009.

______. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

Nyaira, Sandra. 2009. “Mugabe’s Media War: How New Media Help Zimbabwean Journalists TellTheir Story.” Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, discussion paper #D-51.

Open Net Initiative (ONI). 2009. Iran [Online]. http://opennet.net/research/profiles/iran#footnoteref3_kra08om. Accessed July 18, 2009.


Palfrey, John, Bruce Etling, and Robert Faris. 2009. “Reading Twitter in Teheran: Sorry, but RealRevolutions Exceed 140 characters.” The Washington Post [Online]. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/19/AR2009061901598.html. Accessed June 19, 2010.

Pars Times. 1986. “Press Law.” Pars Times (March 19) [Online]. http://www.parstimes.com/law/press_law.html. Accessed June 21, 2009.

Popkin, Helen A. S. 2009. “Social Networks Support Iran Election Protests.” MSN Tech and Gageds[Online]. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31409312/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/.Accessed June 21, 2009.

Post, David. 2009. In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

———. 2003. “Online-Kommunikation.” In Offentliche Kommunikation: Handbuch Kommunikations- undMedienwissenschaft, eds. Gunter Bentele, Hans-Bernd Brosius, and Otfried Jarren. Wiesbaden:Westdeutscher Verlag, 504–22.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF). 2009a. Middle East & North Africa—Iran [Online]. http://en.rsf.org/iran.html. Accessed July 1, 2009.

———. 2009b. Thug who Imposes the Law in Tehran [Online]. http://www.rsf.org/Thug-who-imposes-the-law-in-Tehran.html. Accessed July 1, 2009.

Rossler, Patrick. 1999. “Politiker: Die Regisseure in der medialen Themenlandschaft der Zukunft?Agenda-Setting-Prozesse im Zeitalter neuer Kommunikationstechnologien.“ In Steuerungs- undRegelungsprobleme in der Informationsgesellschaft, eds. Kurt Imhof, Otfried Jarren, and Roger Blum.Opladen/Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 149–66.

Schams, Mohammed. 2009. “Uber Irans aktuelle Lage im Blog.” Deutschlandfunk (June 17, 11:22 am).

Schectman, Joel. 2009. “Iran’s Twitter Revolution? Maybe Not Yet.” Business Week (June 17).

Schulz, Winfried. 1976. Die Konstruktion von Realitat in den Massenmedien: Analyse der aktuellenBerichterstattung. Freiburg/Munchen: Verlag Karl Alber.

Shirky, Clay. 2009. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (reprint).New York: Penguin (Non-Classics).

Stalder, Felix. 2006. Manuel Castells: The Theory of the Network Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Stelter, Brian, and Brad Stone. 2009. “Web Pries Lid of Iranian Censorship.” The New York Times(June 23).

Stocker, Christian, Carolin Neumann, and Thorsten Dorting. 2009. “Ahmadinedschads Angst vor demNetz.” Spiegel.de [Online]. http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,631030,00.html. AccessedJune 18, 2009.

Sullivan, Bob. 2009. “Twitter 1, Censors 0: Why It’s Still Working.” msnbc The Red Tape Chronicles.http://redtape.msnbc.com/2009/06/twitter-1-censorship-0-why-its-working.html. Accessed June18, 2009.

Sysmos.com. 2009. “A Look at Twitter in Iran.” Sysmos.com [Online]. http://blog.sysomos.com/2009/06/21/a-look-at-twitter-in-iran/. Accessed July 24, 2009.

The Atlantic. 2009. “Live-Tweeting The Revolution: Week 1.” The Atlantic [Online]. http://andrewsulli-van.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/livetweeting-the-revolution.html. Accessed August26, 2009.

Twitterfall.com. 2009. “#Iranelection.” http://twitterfall.com/. Accessed daily June/July 2009.

TwitterStreamGraphs. 2009. #Iranelection [Online]. http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/Twitter-StreamGraphs/view.php. Accessed daily July 2009.

Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. California: University ofCalifornia Press.

Zittrain, Jonathan. 2009. “Could Iran Shut Down Twitter?” Future of the Internet [Online]. http://futureoftheinternet.org/could-iran-shut-down-twitter. Accessed August 14, 2009.


a revolution in 140 characters reflecting on the role of social networking technologies in the 2009...

Documents

findthat social media

use of social media

media shirky

foreign media outlets

mediashift perspectiveare

social mediaserve

irans twitter revolution

protests organization