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.
Key Findings
* 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.
