How Iranians’ use of an app is changing politics and civil society

The Washington Post 

By Shervin Malekzadeh

As the Green Wave cascaded into the Iranian Green Movement during the summer of 2009, outside observers rushed to claim the demonstrations as their own. They declared the unfolding crisis to be the “Twitter Revolution,” an updated model of velvet revolution enabled by the new social media, the status update and the tweet replacing the guillotine of 1789 France and the round table of 1989 Poland. The revolution would be recorded and shared, made available for viewing on Facebook and YouTube by a million citizens empowered not by Moscow or Washington but by engineers in Sunnyvale and San Francisco.

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