During the upheaval surrounding the recent Iranian elections, Twitter emerged as a primary means of communications. With it’s easy of use via email, SMS, and several applications, it became a hub of activity as information was distributed both about the elections, police activity, and various proxy information to aid in circumventing the various network restrictions. Now several people are finally analyzing the data during the event and coming up with several interesting discoveries such as the one shown here.
Here, we see the re-tweet network that formed around the top five Iranian tweets. Its structure shows a very different phenomenon, capturing the emergence not of a community but of an elite. Despite massive interest, or perhaps because of it, most people did not discover more than one of the top Iranians. The network simply grew faster than the information could naturally propagate. But a small inner circle did succeed in identifying core sources of information.
See more information in the article, such as a visualization of the cnnfail hashtag corresponding with the dissemination of proxy addresses and police activity.
via Evolution of a Revolution: Visualizing Millions of Iran Tweets.
