Mutual Influence of Twitter and Postelection Events of Iranian Presidential Election

Abstract

The 10th Iranian presidential election, held on 12 June 2009, was the most important political event in Iran during the last decade. Postelection protests were raised after announcement of the results. Social networking web sites including Twitter and Facebook played an important role in distribution of news, images and videos of the events in that period of time. It is believed that these social networks were quite important for protesters to organize and manage their demonstrations.In this research, we study the tweets published in Twitter around this subject, from 3 months before the election until 15 months after the election. We study the structure of the social network, its dynamics and the mutual effects of Twitter and Iranian people on post-election protests and events.We show that the most active users were joined just a few days after the election when some mobile services were slowed-down by the telecommunication companies. We also show that Tweets were mainly used to communicate the events to the outside world, i.e. the Twitter was used mainly as a one-way media.We also analyze the content of tweets and find the most frequent words and patterns. We show how the events affect the rate of tweet publication and how famous politicians in real society affect tweets in virtual society.