1
Between a Rock and a Cell Phone: Social Media Use during Mass
Protests in Iran, Tunisia and Egypt
ANDREA KAVANAUGH, Virginia Tech
SEUNGWON YANG, Virginia Tech
STEVEN SHEETZ, Virginia Tech
LIN TZY LI, Virginia Tech
ED FOX, Virginia Tech
In this paper we examine the use of social media, and especially Twitter, in Iran, Tunisia and Egypt
during the mass political demonstrations and protests in June 2009, December 2010 - January 2011, and
February 2011, respectively. We compare this usage with methods and findings from other studies on the
use of Twitter in emergency situations, such as natural and man-made disasters. We draw on our own
experiences and participant-observations as an eyewitness in Iran (first author), and on Twitter data from
Iran, Tunisia and Egypt. In these three cases, Twitter filled a unique technology and communication gap
at least partially. We summarize suggested directions for future research with a view of placing this work
in the larger context of social media use in conditions of crisis and social convergence.
Categories and Subject Descriptors: H5.m. Information Interfaces and Presentation
General Terms: Twitter, mobile telephony, user experience
Additional Key Words and Phrases: Microblogging, social media, crisis informatics
ACM Reference Format:
Kavanaugh, A., Yang, S., Sheetz, S. Li, L.T., and Fox, E.A. 2011. Between a rock and a cell phone: Social
Media Use during Mass Protests in Iran, Tunisia and Egypt. ACM Trans. Of CHI. (date) pages.
DOI = 10.1145/0000000.0000000 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/0000000.0000000
1. INTRODUCTION
This paper seeks to build on an area of work known as emergency information
management and, more specifically, on a growing research area referred to as ‘crisis
informatics’ -- a term coined by Hagar (Hagar, 2007) and extended by Palen, Hughes
and colleagues (Hughes, Palen, Sutton, Liu, & Vieweg, 2008; Palen, Vieweg, Liu, &
Hughes, 2009), among others. Emergency (or crisis) communication management
pertains to the use of communication channels and messages to coordinate activity
and convey information among citizens, rescue workers, government agencies and
others. The recent literature on crisis communication includes analyses of
information seeking behavior following such disasters as 9/11 (Schneider & Foot,
2004), Hurricane Katrina (James & Rashed, 2006), the Virginia Tech shooting
tragedy April 16, 2007 (Palen et al., 2009; Sheetz, Kavanaugh, Quek, Kim, & Liu,
forthcoming 2010; Vieweg, Palen, Liu, Hughes, & Sutton, 2008), and various natural
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation, under grant IIS-0916733, and the Virginia
Tech Center for Community Security Resilience and Security (CCSR).
Author’s addresses: A. Kavanaugh, S. Yang, L. Li and E. Fox, Computer Science Department, Virginia
Tech; S. Sheetz, College of Business, Virginia Tech.
Permission to make digital or hardcopies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted
without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation.
Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with
credits permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any
component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be
requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701 USA,
fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org.
@2010 ACM 1539-9087/2010/03-ART39 $10.00
DOI10.1145/0000000.0000000 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/0000000.0000000
2
disasters, such as the earthquakes in Haiti and New Zealand (Goolsby, 2010), to
name just a few.
Speaking on the role of information and communication technology (ICT), Palen
and colleagues note that ‘crisis informatics’ includes “empirical study as well as
socially and behaviorally conscious ICT development and deployment. Both research
and development of ICT for crisis situations need to work from a united perspective
of the information, disaster, and technical sciences.” It is the sharing of information
in a disaster that is especially crucial, and different types of ICT facilitate sharing to
a greater or lesser degree based on a variety of circumstances.
In this paper we consider the use of twitter in the mass protests in Iran, Tunisia
and Egypt and specifically, information sharing among the general public (as opposed
to information sharing among rescue personnel and/or government officials). We
compare the use of twitter in prior studies of similar cases of mass post-election
protests (Zuckerman, 2009), and types of socially convergent behavior (Hughes et al.,
2008). The goal is to clarify the use of twitter and the particular gap this technology
filled.
2. SOCIAL MEDIA USE IN CONTEXT
In thinking about the use of social media during the uprisings in Iran, Tunisia and
Egypt, it is important to keep in mind the penetration of satellite television, the
internet, social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and mobile phones. The diffusion of
satellite communications and broadcast programs with Middle East news, talk shows
and political discussion has arguably laid a foundation for rising expectations among
citizens and local organizations, including the private sector. London-based Middle
East Broadcast Corporation introduced entertainment programming of, by and for
the region. More importantly, the advent of Al-Jazeera television, based in Qatar
with the 24 hour news and feature stories in multiple languages (i.e., Arabic,
Turkish, Persian, English), has offered programming that is often critical of Middle
East regimes and national or regional policies. In Iran, despite an official ban on
satellite dish ownership, many middle class families have them. Government
confiscations just mean that people have to purchase another dish and install it.
Internet penetration throughout the Middle East is quite variable; based on 2009
estimates by the International Telecommunications Union of the percent of the
population who use the internet, it was highest in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)
(75%), Israel (63%), Oman (51%) and Morocco (41%). It was lowest in Iraq (1%) Libya
(6%), and Yemen (10%). Of the three countries we focus on in this paper, Tunisia is
highest (34%), followed by Egypt (24%) and Iran (11%). It is helpful to see these
percentages in comparison with cell phone (2009) and Facebook penetration (2010)
shown in see Table 1.
Table I. Internet, Cell Phone and Facebook Penetration
Internet
(2009)
Facebook
(2010)
Cell Phone
(2009)
Tunisia 34 19 95
Egypt 24 5 67
Iran 11 FB blocked 71
Source: Internet and Cell phone data are from the
International Telecommunications Union Statistics Database
(2009); Facebook data is for 2010 (Arab Social Media Report,
2011).
Facebook users are very few across the region, with the highest percentages in the
UAE (45%) and Israel (43%). At 19%, however, Tunisia is among the next highest
(after Kuwait at 21%). In Egypt, only 5% of the population uses Facebook, and in
Iran, the government blocks the site, although many Iranians are able to use proxies.
3
In all these locations, however, the majority of users are young adults, who also make
up they largest proportion of the adult population in Tunisia, Egypt and Iran. They
are not only typically well educated (at least high school diploma), but they are also
typically without jobs.
Mobile phone penetration throughout the region is much higher than Facebook or
the Internet; it is close to full penetration in Tunisia (95%), followed by Iran (71%)
and Egypt (67%). In the Gulf States (UAE, Qatar, Kuwait), Saudi Arabia and Israel
there are more cell phones than citizens (ranging from 232to 125%); even Libya has
high penetration (78%). Lowest are Yemen (35%) and the Palestinian territories
(29%). It is worth noting that cell phone penetration is also very high in Algeria
(94%) where there have been some demonstrations in recent weeks. Mobile phone
penetration is key to communications from the streets and in crowds not only for
voice and short message systems (SMS), including twitter, but also for capturing
images and sound on smart phones.
3. USE OF TWITTER IN EMERGENCIES
Twitter, a form of micro-blogging using an open-source web framework called Ruby
on Rails, is a free, short messaging service established in 2004 by a private company
based in San Francisco. The growing research on the use of twitter in emergencies,
crises or disasters has a short history, given twitter’s short life. Some of the most
relevant work has been done by Palen, Hughes and colleagues on the 2008
Hurricanes Gustav and Ike (Hughes & Palen, 2009), the 2007 wild fires in Southern
California (Hughes et al., 2008), by Zuckerman on the Moldovan election protests in
Africa (Zuckerman, 2009), and Starbird and colleagues (2010). These studies
specifically focus on the use of twitter in a disaster or crisis situation. Highly relevant
is the work of Devin Gaffney (2010) and a 2009 study by the Web Ecology Project
(WEP) that analyzed over 2 million twitter posts (tweets) on the Iran elections that
WEP collected between June 7 (just before the election) and June 26, 2009. The
Gaffney research and the WEP analyses include tweets both inside and outside Iran,
with the vast majority of tweets being posted from outside Iran.
The distinction between the analysis by the WEP and our work is that we are
focused on the use of twitter by citizens in the midst of the crisis situation, that is,
the streets and alleyways of Iranian cities during the demonstrations. We treat this
as a crisis situation because after the first demonstration on June 13 involving
millions of people, the protesters were always under threat of attack by uniformed
police and plainclothes, volunteer militia members (the ‘Basij’).
Hughes et al report that twitter use under duress and in crisis conditions of the
two hurricane episodes of Ike and Gustav in 2008 is distinct from routine general
twitter communication behavior in two ways: 1) fewer tweets are sent as replies to
other tweets; and 2) fewer URLs are included in the tweet posts. They surmise that
this is because in a crisis, people need information broadcast as widely as possible to
as many people as possible at once (i.e., no need to reply to a specific individual) and
people are less likely to go to a website for additional information during the
emergency. In the case of Iran, it was difficult for people in Iran to consult the Web,
because the Internet was extremely slow during the weeks following the elections.
3.1 Twitter Use in Mass Protests in Iran: June 2009
The day after the election results were announced in Iran, i.e., on June 13, 2009, a
crowd estimated at several million people poured into the streets surrounding Azadi
Square in Tehran. Eight people who were among a group of protesters who attacked
a barracks were reported killed by militia from inside the barracks. Throughout the
next five days, there were additional (although smaller) mass demonstrations in the
4
streets that were relatively peaceful, culminating in a large demonstration in
Teheran on Thursday, June 18, to mourn those who had been killed or injured earlier
week. On Friday, June 19, one week after the elections, the Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Khamenei announced during his Friday prayer sermon that the election
results would stand (with the announced winner as incumbent President
Ahmadinejad) and that any further protests would be considered illegal.
Throughout the weeks following the disputed election results, the government
tightened control over data networks and Internet gateways, such that traffic over
them was reduced to a crawl. Various social Internet sites were blocked, including
Twitter, Facebook and eventually Youtube. Voice of America Persian, a US funded
satellite television network, broadcast proxy IP sites so citizens could connect to
blocked sites, and upload or download pictures and videos of recent street protests. A
Twitter data collection by Gaffney (2010) for this period indicated that the
overwhelming number of tweeters were, in fact, outside Iran.
Iranian citizens used a mix of interpersonal and mediated communication to get
and compare information, about the election results, the opposition or government’s
response, what had been happening in the streets, and whether, when and where
additional protests were being called. Taxi drivers were a particularly good source of
information on whether and where there were protests planned during this period.
There are several reasons why the use of twitter was particularly important in
the case of the Iran street protests: 1) the governments had blocked access to the
twitter website, so it was only accessible via a proxy server or a text message on a
mobile phone, and 2) protesters often needed information ‘on-the-fly’ while they were
in the streets, to avoid clashes with police and plainclothes militia. So they used
their mobile phones not only to take pictures or videos, but also to share information
about what was happening at that moment and specific location, such as which street
to avoid due to heavy police presence. This was also the case for Tunisia and Egypt.
3.2 Twitter Use in Tunisia: December 2010
Twitter as well as Facebook appeared to play a key role in spreading information in
Tunisia at the outset of the unrest in response to the suicide by self-immolation of a
young street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in the town of Sidi Bouzid. According to
Ryan (2011) reporting for Al-Jazeera, Rochdi Horchni, a relative of Mohamed
Bouazizi said protesters took to the streets with “a rock in one hand, and a cell phone
in the other.”
The Facebook statistical portal (Socialbakers) claims the penetration rate of
Facebook in Tunisia is only about 19%, but in combination with other channels,
including face-to-face, TV and phone, it helped to notify others of events and to
coordinate initial street demonstrations. The Tunisian government blocked access to
the Internet in early December, thereby restricting use of Facebook, Twitter (on the
web) and YouTube (until Jan 13, 2011). Subsequently, President Ben Ali tried to
calm the population by promising to unblock access to Internet Web sites. Ben Ali
fled Tunisia on January 14. Figures 1 and 2 shows charts (proportion of tweets per
tweeting individual or organization) and trends (tweet frequency per day) for
Tunisia. We collected and analyzed 65,748 tweets (using #SidiBouzid, #tunisia,
#tunileaks) from January 1, 2011 to February 1, 2011 and produced visualizations
using Desktop Archivist and web-based Archivist.
5
Figure 1. Top Users by Tweet Count (#SidiBouzid)
The most frequent tweeters (twitter users posting messages or ‘tweets’) were not
necessarily in the country. There is a large majority (almost 63%) of our collected
tweets that are retweets (original tweets that are copied by other tweeters and sent
out under their twitter account as ‘retweets’). This pattern is a likely indication of
users outside Tunisia forwarding on messages from users inside the country. There
were clear peaks in the volume of tweets in January on the 9th, 10th, 12th and 14th
(President Ben Ali left the country on the 14th of January).
The protests in Tunisia inspired similar street demonstrations across the Middle
East, the largest of which have been in Egypt. The unrest in Libya continues as of
mid-March, but there is a near black-out of communication media of all kinds.
3.3 Twitter Use in Egypt: January 2011
Egypt is the most populous Arab country with almost 85 million inhabitants.
Massive protests building throughout January 2011 (primarily in Cairo and
Alexandria, the two largest cities) called for an end to the 30-year reign of President
Hosni Mubarak with complaints of corruption, unemployment and lack of democracy.
The Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Survey conducted April 12 - May 7, 2010
showed a majority of 59% of Egyptian Muslims reported that they believed
democracy was preferable to any other kind of government. The street
demonstrations seemed to reflect this kind of sentiment for the most part. The
demonstrations were clearly a crisis situation for citizens, as several hundred deaths
were reported from the initial crackdown by pro-Mubarak forces.
The Egyptian government quickly cut off access to the Internet and restricted the
flow of cell phone network traffic. For example, a ReTweet (RT) on the day of the
million man march (February 1) for example says, “RT @Dima_Khatib: Mobiles
around Tahrir Square are not working any more. Blocked too. Like internet #egypt
#jan25 #cairo”. Nonetheless, a stream of communications, including tweets, managed
to find their way out of the country. We collected and analyzed tweets (using
common hashtags including #jan25, #cairo, #egypt, #elbaradei) from January 28 to
February 14, 2011 and produced visualizations using the Desktop Archivist and webbased
Archivist tool. Just a collection of 500 tweets from the day of the million man
march shows diverse sources of tweets, half of which are web-based, suggesting they
are sent from outside Egypt.
6
A focus on tweets just before until just after Mubarak’s resignation, February 7 –
14, 2011, with 514,782 posts, shows a clear spike in communications during key
events (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Tweet Volume Over Time: Egypt (Feb 7-14, 2011)
A tag cloud presentation of the 83,745 twitter posts on February 8 (with hashtag
#jan25, although many posts include multiple tags, such as #Egypt, #Mubarak, #El
Baradei, #Tahrir) the day that activist Wael Ghonim roused protesters, shows the
most common terms that appeared (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Tag Cloud of Top Tweets February 8, 2011
Wael Ghonim is a prominent Egyptian activist who, among other communications,
created the Facebook page (anonymously at first) called “We are all Khaled Said” –
7
named after a young Egyptian who was brutally murdered by police allegedly for
capturing police corruption on video. The Facebook page gained much attention in
the weeks leading up to the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, Cairo (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Facebook page: We are all Khaled Said, created by Wael Ghonim
Changes in the predominance of terms appearing in tweets with these hashtags
during the week of February 7-14, 2011 indicate the changing focus of
communication among users as events unfolded and led up to Mubarak’s February
10th radio address in which he announces he will not resign (Figure 4 left), followed
the next day, Friday, February 11, 2011, with Egypt’s Vice President Suleiman
announcing that Mubarak has resigned (Figure 5, right).
Figure 5. On left: Tag Cloud of Tweets: Mubarak radio address refusing to resign (Feb 10);
On right: Vice President announces Mubarak has resigned (Feb 11)
The location of tweeters is sometimes indicated (optionally) in a user’s profile. A
listing of the top tweeters locations, excluding ‘not reported’ and Arabic words
8
(not captured by Archivist) in Egypt just during the week of February 7-14, 2011
is shown in Table 2.
Table. 2. Location and Frequency of Top Tweeters
Location Frequency
Egypt 63255
London 5921
Kuwait 5415
USA 4697
iPhone: 2925
dubai 2347
Earth 2004
Jordan 1918
Canada 1789
NYC 1785
UK 1760
Jeddah 1691
Paris 1665
los angeles 1644
Lebanon 1630
Saudi Arabia 1592
We have collapsed all locations within Egypt into one category in Table 2 for the sake
of clarity and comparison; users indicate their location in multiple ways (e.g., Egypt;
Cairo, Egypt; Cairo; Alexandria, Egypt). The top location of Egypt would have
presumably many more users if we were able to show the users who indicated their
location in Arabic. What is important to note is that the highest frequency of tweets
is within Egypt, whereas in the case of Iran during the June 2009 post-election
demonstrations, there were fewer than 100 estimated twitter users inside Iran. The
bulk of the tweeting was being done by users outside Iran, often re-tweeting posts
from users inside the country.
4. COMPARISON WITH OTHER CASES
The Iranian government appeared to have restricted cell phone use in areas of the
Tehran where protests were taking place (around Azadi Square, along Vali Asr
street, and Ferdowsi Square) and in Cairo (around Tahrir Square) by limiting
bandwidth on cell phone towers that serve those areas. This government control was
also reported in the mass street protests in Moldova and in Belarus. By shutting
down cell phone service, the government can reduce the possibility of protestors
receiving messages via mobile phone while in the streets where protests are
underway. This also eliminates protesters’ ability to send and receive twitter posts,
and other SMS messages. The Iranian Ministry of Telecommunications reported
that it shut down Internet-based message services during the Iranian elections in
2006 (local elections) because it was not possible to identify users, whereas the
content of SMS messages sent via cell phones was not shut down completely because
subscribers could be easily identified (Zuckerman, 2009). This identification of
senders and receivers benefits police intelligence.
9
In the cases of Tunisia and Egypt, the government shut down Internet access,
although briefly, in an attempt to squelch communication among citizens with each
other and with the outside world. On January 25, 2011 about 5:20 pm, Internet
traffic to and from Egypt across 80 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) around the
world dropped precipitously (the four main ISPs are Link Egypt, Vodafone/Faya,
Telecom Egypt, and Etisalat Misr). Close to 97% of Egyptian Internet traffic was
reported lost, according to Julien Coulon, co-founder of Cedexis, a French Internet
performance monitoring and traffic management system. The one exception, Noor
Group, still had 83 live routes to its Egyptian customers, possibly out of technical
incompetence on the part of the Egyptian Ministry of Post and Telephone in shutting
down the gateway, or possibly because the Egyptian Stock Exchange has a Noor
address (http://www.egyptse.com). Despite the loss of Internet access to most users,
some Egyptians were able to gain intermittent Internet access via international
telephone (dial-up) connections.
It is not technically difficult to disrupt mobile phone service, as the Egyptian
government also did on Friday, January 28; it simply ordered the Egyptian operator
ECMS to shut off service, especially in the main demonstration areas of Cairo and
Alexandria. Mobile phone signals were patchy and text messages inoperative.
Throughout the ordeals of both Egypt and Tunisia, however, Al-Jazeera continued to
broadcast live television programming (with very brief disruption in Cairo) which
was also available over the Internet.
5. CONCLUSIONS
The use of ICT during the mass demonstrations and street protests in post-election
Iran, and in Tunisia and Egypt, as with similar protests, can be considered crisis
informatics in social convergence events. It is a crisis in that people are sometimes
under attack from police or plainclothes militia, and are always under the threat of
attack based on past experience. The street protests are social convergence events,
insofar as a large number of people are communicating with each other in proximity
and with people in more distant locations (home, other parts of the city, other cities,
abroad) who have an interest in what the individual participant is seeing and doing.
Given the finding of Hughes and colleagues (Hughes & Palen, 2009) that people who
adopted twitter during a crisis or social convergence event continued to use the
service, and given the ongoing demonstrations and protests in the region, we can
expect to see increasing use of twitter for crisis communication and response in Iran,
Tunisia and Egypt.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank the National Science Foundation for support of this research that is part
of a larger investigation on crisis informatics called CTRnet: Crisis, Tragedy and Recovery Network (IIS-
0916733). We are also grateful to our collaborators on CTRnet, notably, Donald Shoemaker, Apostel
Natsev, Lexing Xie, Venkat Srinivasan, Riham Abdel Moneim and Travis Whalen.
REFERENCES
Aday, S., Farrell, H., Lynch, M., Sides, J., Kelly, J. and Zuckerman, E. 2010. Blogs and Bullets: New media
in contentious politics. US Institute of Peace. Available online at
http://www.usip.org/publications/blogs-and-bullets-new-media-in-contentious-politics.
Arab Social Media Report. (2011). Dubai: Dubai School of Government.
Gaffney, D. 2010. #IranElection: Quantifying the Role of Social Media in 140 Characters or Less. Senior
Thesis, Bennington College, Bennington, VT.
Goolsby, R. (2010). Social media as crisis platform: The future od community maps/crisis maps. ACM
Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol., 1(1), 11 pages.
Hagar, C. (2007). The information needs of farmers and use of ICTs. In B. Nerlich & M. Doring (Eds.),
From Mayhem to Meaning: Assessing the social and cultural impact of the 2001 foot and mouth
outbreak in the UK. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
10
Hughes, A. L., & Palen, L. (2009). Twitter adoption and use in mass convergence and emergency events.
Paper presented at the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Gothenburg,
Sweden.
Hughes, A. L., Palen, L., Sutton, J., Liu, S., B., & Vieweg, S. (2008, May 2008). "Site-seeing" in disaster: An
examination of online social convergence. Paper presented at the International Conference on
Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), Washington, DC.
James, A., & Rashed, T. (2006). In their own words: utilizing weblogs in quick response research. Boulder,
CO: University of Colorado.
Palen, L., Vieweg, S., Liu, S., B., & Hughes, A. L. (2009). Crisis Informatics: Studying Crisis in a
Networked World. Social Science Computer Review, 27(4), 467-480.
Ryan, Yasmine. How Tunisia's revolution began. January 26, 2011. AlJazeera.net.
Schneider, S., & Foot, K. (2004). Crisis Communication & New Media: The Web after September 11. In P.
Howard & S. Jones (Eds.), Society Online: The Internet in Context (pp. 137-154). Beverly Hills,
CA: Sage.
Sheetz, S., Kavanaugh, A., Quek, F., Kim, B. J., & Liu, S.-C. (forthcoming 2010). Expectation of
connecteness and cell phone use in crises. International Journal of Emergency Management
(IJEM).
Starbird, C., Palen, L., Hughes, A., and Vieweg, S. 2010. Chatter on The Red: What hazards threat reveals
about the social life of microblogged information. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer
Suported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2010). Savannah Georgia (February 6-10, 2010).
Vieweg, S., Palen, L., Liu, S., B., Hughes, A. L., & Sutton, J. (2008, May 2008). Collective Intelligence in
Disaster: Examination of the phenomenon in the aftermath of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting.
Paper presented at the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Washington,
DC.
Zuckerman, E. (2009, April 13, 2009). Studying Twitter and the Moldovan protests. My heart's in Accra
Retrieved January 6, 2009, from http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/04/13/studying-
twitter-and-the-moldovan-protests/
Vieweg, S., et al. 2008. Collective Intelligence in Disaster: Examination of the phenomenon in the
aftermath of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. In Proceedings of the International Conference on
Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2008). Washington, DC.
Zuckerman, E. 2009. Studying Twitter and the Moldovan protests. My Heart's in Accra [blog] 2009 April
13, 2009 [cited 2009 January 6]; Available from:
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/04/13/studying-twitter-and-the-moldovan-protests/.
Received March 2011