Election Tweets Become Protest Tweets in Iran

The revolution will be is being Twittered. So what if it helped Obama win an election? Young Iranians are using it to try and overthrow an autocratic regime.

After massive protests of last weekend's election results, which gave President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a landslide victory over reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi, the Iranian government shut down Facebook, YouTube, BBC, and text messaging. They forgot about Twitter, and rebellious Iranian students have since been using that site to talk with one another, organize protests, and spread descriptions and images of what is really going on inside Iran throughout the world.

Mousavi has managed to campaign as a reformist politician, and has energized the Iranian youth much the same way Barack Obama did -- by utilizing new media.

An editorial posted on Al-Jazeera, written by a young Iranian woman who supports Mousavi, described the activism of the youth and social elite:

"They are also taking advantage of new media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to spread their message and bolster their cause with downloadable brochures, slideshows and video clips. Chain emailing and text messaging of satiric anti-Ahmadinejad jokes is another successful effort they have pioneered; it is not uncommon to receive up to 10 new quips a day...Not permitted the option of ads on state-run television and radio, this tech-savvy youth base has, instead, unleashed a creative street-and-cyberspace campaign that is gaining momentum day by day."

In the United States, Barack Obama used new media to engage young voters, but in Iran, Hossein Mousavi is using it because it's the only way to communicate in a country where the government arrests bloggers, shuts down newspapers, and harrasses dissidents. One article describes a pre-election night of "thousands of other young Iranians (weaving) through the traffic jam they had created, blowing whistles, waving green balloons, throwing campaign handouts into the air like confetti. Tehran had never seen anything like last week's "green wave". The next morning, thousands of pictures and videos of the event popped up all over Facebook, revealing to millions of others what was really going on in the streets of Tehran: a peaceful and jubilant demonstration of the youth. Friends "texted each other to find out where the action was", and Mousavi's campaign headquarters emailed and texted supporters messages from the campaign.

Now, just a few days since the release of the election results, which increasingly look fraudulent, Iran's youth have turned the tools of campaigning into tools of protest. They've been especially adept at using Twitter to organize tens of thousands throughout the entire country, "tweeting" to all who were listening that everyone should stand on their rooftops and chant pro-Mousavi phrases. At night, the sound of chanters in Tehran has filled the streets (click here for my colleague Parisa Saranj's personal account of the Iranian youth reaction and here for Wesley Vaughn's election primer).

Mousavi himself finally appeared at a post-election rally, and Twitter pulsated with tweets about where to go and what was happening.

And to the outside world, Iranians are tweeting pictures of violence, protests, and stories of beatings and arrests, as well as crackdowns at universities in Tehran. A brief search of Twitter on Monday under the category #IranElection provided with dozens of posts every minute. "Just in,Cyrusnews reports of rumors; 16 IRCG commanders arrested after trying to persuade elements in the Army to join ppl," read one. "Change your location and timezone to Tehran. Make it harder for govt to find people," said another.

Twitter has become so important to election events that a couple hours of scheduled maintenance were protested using the #nomaintenance tag until it was postponed.

Andrew Sullivan has collected mountains of information and photos from Iran simply through Twitter. "It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer," he says. "You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before." In fact, one popular category on Twitter at the moment - #CNNFail - is dedicated to begging Western news outlets like CNN to give more coverage to the events evolving in Tehran.

While we wait to see what will happen next in Iran, sites like Facebook and Twitter, along with their young and tech-savvy users, are redefining the word revolution.