ReTweet Revolution is a visual exploration of the most popular conversation threads that were passed amongst Twitter users at the time of the events following the Iranian elections in June of 2009. Twitter served as an incredibly engaging mechanism to disseminate information on the riots and protests that were taking place around the world. Its realtime qualities enables information to rapidly spread between users, while its personal style drives a sense of emotional involvement to the events. This piece aims to help viewers grasp which of the messages were chosen to be passed on by millions of twitter users, and how they were manipulated along the way. I strongly believe that the true revolution lies in how this medium lets people relate to news in an engaged manner. This is what I set out to explore by creating this visualization.

It is still unclear if and how Twitter made an actual difference for people on the ground in Iran. There is not enough information to claim that Iranians had been using Twitter as a means to organize the protests. However, it is unquestionable that Twitter's unique characteristics prompted distributed reactions on a scale never seen before, engaging people all around the world. By far, the messages with imminently important information, received an overwhelming amount of retweets: from posting proxy IP addresses to passing on a plea to wear green. However, as the events played out, users learned to post messages without linking to the origin as a means of protecting the Iranian sources. It is clear that retweeting is revolutionizing the way people connect to news and newsworthy events.

The ReTweet Revolution applet displays 372 of the most popular threads extracted from a pool of over 230,000 messages posted on Twitter between June 14th and June 24th. It is important to remember that this is only a sampling of the Twitter data polled from the public timeline at regular intervals. Nevertheless, the content is substantial enough to identify trends and get a sense for people's practices.

The visualization begins on the 14th of June, displaying twitter messages as they come in throughout the night after election day in Iran. Each tweet is analyzed and placed within its corresponding thread, which then grows taller. As the time moves forwards, it is possible to see the different threads appear from the right. By clicking on one of the threads, the applet enters a focus screen that displays the chosen thread's network structure. The yellow node in the middle represents the earliest published tweet, corresponding to this thread, that was found by the ReTweet Revolution script. Many times it serves as the central node - the starting point of the conversation. When focusing on a thread, it is possible to see how a message was ReTweeted from one user to another, along with how the message content was changed as it was passed.

Thanks to @zephoria and the MSR twitter team: @alicetiara, @yardi, @redlog & Lucy M for all their help. Special thanks to @blurky, @judithd and @wattenberg for their valuable feedback along the way.

Built with Processing.