The Revolution is Twitterfied

Submitted by Michaela Hackner on 16 June 2009

Five years ago, CNN and 24-hour news channels and personal blogs captured US citizen dissent at the 2004 Presidential election results (or lack thereof). In 2008 TwitterVoteReport attempted to provide real-time election monitoring as US citizens posted voting experiences to their Twitter feeds. Concurrently the Obama campaign leveraged every social media tool in the book to engage US citizens, empower them with ways they could help, and ultimately contributed to winning the next presidency.

Right now the world is watching the next level of emergent social media and citizen engagement. Twitter and social media hacktivists are once again changing the landscape. In Iran. The power of these tools (and their ability to reach millions) is explicitly demonstrated in the defiant behavior of Iranians, dissatisfied with the recent election results. What's more fascinating to this social media geek, is that through cooperation from hackers and content generators, this social-media based revolution is happening from within a closed society.

As @zittrain expressed on their Twitterstream, “Qualities that make Twitter seem inane & half-baked are what make it so powerful.” The same goes for the rest of the tools in the Iranian citizen's arsenal. The very openness and flexibility of purpose is exactly what's powering this type of engagement.

Here's just a taste of the thousands of pages being leveraged in this fight: Mousavi's Flickrstream:

Images on Boston's the Big Picture

YouTube:
A student group posting videos on the Iranian election and aftermath

Facebook:
Mousavi on Facebook (via rwanderman)
Protest Iran Election

Twitter: