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The Social Media Revolution That Wasn’t

November 18th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Twitter | 1 Comment »

Remember that canon I wrote back in early June about Twitter and the Iran election?

You know, the one about the power of social media and the influence it had on the dissemination of crucial, otherwise censored information following Ahmandinejad’s brutal win?

Well, it turns out the social media-driven revolution that was unfolding on Twitter didn’t have the impact we thought it did.

Charles Leadbeater, a British writer and analyst, and Annika Wong, his fellow researcher, decided to empirically explore Twitter’s role during that time. Making use of data provided by media analytics company, Sysomos, Leadbeater and Wong found that Twitter’s impact was negligible – at best.

And why not?

After all, a mere .027% of Iranians are registered to use Twitter – and of that minuscule figure includes some Westerners who changed their Twitter address to Iran as a show of solidarity.

Duh!

Given that only a third of Iranians have Internet access – these findings make complete sense.

I – like so many others who spent countless hours pondering the powerful link between Twitter and Iran’s potential regime change – was dead wrong.

Perhaps, Twitter isn’t has effective as we thought.

Or, perhaps, I was naive enough to get caught up in, what I thought, was a “big” event unfolding before my eyes.

Fool me once, but not twice.

 Tags: iran election, social media, social revolution, Twitter, twitter influence