We’ve posted here before (here and here) about the use of Twitter to share information and news about the recent protests over the fraudulent Iranian elections.
Thanks to Mashable, we’ve learned that the Web Ecology Project has published a detailed analysis of The Iranian Election on Twitter — and the findings are pretty remarkable:
- 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.
A firsthand look at the power of this social media tool in terms of community, news dissemination, content sharing, discussion and debate. As we’ve stated before, also the latest case study of how online tools are increasingly allowing citizen journalists to break the biggest stories of the day — and how even the traditional media is becoming increasingly reliant on this user-generated content for their news reports.