“ As we noted on The Lede last week, a source in Tehran told us that of 20 people surveyed at a large opposition rally in south Tehran last Thursday, not one of them said they had heard about it through Twitter. For all the discussion by bloggers and journalists outside Iran of the way the micro-blogging service has helped to inform the rest of the world about opposition protests over the past two weeks, the tool seems to have been less important inside Iran, where many people have heard about rallies through text messaging on cellphones or simple word of mouth. Still, since so many bloggers and journalists have been glued to Twitter feeds that appear to be coming from inside Iran, it is interesting to read this analysis by a company called Sysomos, which concluded that, of Iran’s 65 million citizens, “there are now 19,235 Twitter users in Iran, compared with 8,654 in mid-May.
June 22, 2009
