An interesting look at how Twitter was used in the 18 days following the Iranian election by the Web Ecology Project ("researching the internet so you don’t have to") in Cambridge, Mass.
The Iranian Election on Twitter: The First Eighteen Days
- From 7 June 2009 until the time of publication (26 June 2009), we have recorded 2,024,166 tweets about the election in Iran.
- Approximately 480,000 users have contributed to this conversation alone.
- 59.3% of users tweet just once, and these users contribute 14.1% of the total number.
- The top 10% of users in our study account for 65.5% of total tweets.
- 1 in 4 tweets about Iran is a retweet of another user’s content.
Summary
The political events that transpired during and after the 2009 Iranian election garnered global attention, particularly due to the purported importance of Twitter. As a platform-independent service for communication, Twitter has become a preferred vehicle to broadcast unfolding events in Iran both within the country and to an international audience. The use of Twitter to communicate about these events is a striking instance of the memetic spread of behaviors and ideas online. Our report serves as an initial assessment of the Twitter web ecology — that is, users interacting with their technological environment — to sketch out the broad anatomy of discourse on Twitter by providing a novel perspective with quantitative data. Our servers continue to collect data, and we plan to publish a follow-up report that comprehensively explores the structure of the events from additional perspectives and depths.
Read full report in PDF format here.