In 2009, one of the most fashionable events in terms of online protest movements was, without a doubt, the Iranian Green Movement. There are, however, many misconceptions around what was happening in Iran prior, during and after the electoral process (Clay Shirk, for example, argued here that the Green Movement was ‘the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media’).
If you followed the Iranian protests online. you could have thought that a popular movement was set to bring down Ahmadinejad's 'totalitarian’ and ‘repressive’ regime. If you were paying attention to Twitter (one of the few places producing live content during the protests), it would have seemed that the whole Iranian cybersphere was reacting and organizing against the Ayatollah regime. However, fortunately, the online realm has not taken over reality yet! Stories built on what happened in Iran based on the Twitter streamline, were misleading. Most of the online protest was fueled from outside the country. And, the ones that were indeed tweeting from Tehran were not representative of the whole Iranian population.
We should also take into account Internet levels of penetration in the Islamic republic. While Iran has higher levels of penetration than most other countries in the region, most of its population is still unconnected. Those that protested online, belonged only to one particular age and population group: middle-class, young professionals and students from the main Iranian cities. What I am trying to say here, is not that there was not a huge social conflict in the aftermath of the elections, but that the online noise was not representative of what was happening.
Online activists that were not really organized on the ground were the ones that mainly fueled the hype; perhaps, they were not even in Iran. There are many commentators arguing that yes, indeed, the online side of the Iranian protest was essential to the movement. Amongst these are many Twitter loyalists that claim that Twitter had a central role in the Iranian movement. The myth over the power of ‘social mobilization’ tools was also fueled by people like Clay, who, while sitting in a sofa at TED (playing the western universalist addicted to CNN and Twitter), believed that tweets and retweets account for the beginning of a revolution.
An analysis of online activity around the hash-tag #iranelection could suggest that there was considerable online organization (what does online organisation stand for in cyberspace, anyway? Could there be organization in cyberspace? Or, does the very structure of cyberspace provide only for disorganization?) Anyway, for the analysis of what happened around those days, it could be useful to think to what extent the hype around Twitter was fueled from the United States. Two things are true: there were demonstrators in the streets of Tehran (they were not controlled or organized from the online realm) and there were hundreds of thousands of tweets about the Iranian election. However, all the hype around the power of Twitter to organize civil society could have well been promoted from the US as a marketing campaign. There is no doubt that after the Iranian protests the only winner of the revolution was, indeed, Twitter.
