The effectiveness of Internet for informing and mobilizing in the events after the Iranian presidential election Mehdi Yahyanejad Activists looking for change in Iran used social networking, blogs, social networks and micro blogging platforms before and after the Iranian presidential election to build a political movement within a country with little political freedom and limited freedom of press. Internet helped to make the movement known to the international audience. It created a common understanding among the protesters and allowed coming to agreements on the tactics and publicizing demonstrations. Iranian government used a range of tactics from denial of service attacks against the opposition websites to the surveillance of Internet traffic to interrupt the use of Internet by the opposition. Social media provided a new way of communication that was harder to be captured by the Iranian government. In addition, was more secure relative to other modes of political activity in Iran.Table of Contents The effectiveness of Internet for informing and mobilizing in the events after the Iranian presidential election .......................................................................1 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 2 The ways the Internet played a role ................................................................................... 8 Building the discourse of democracy and non-violence tactics..................................... 8 Political Activism on the web right before the election....................................................8 The political scene before the election ............................................................................ 11 Providing evidence of unusual activity during the election day ................................... 11 Live video feed proved the militia attack on Mosavi’s headquarter...................................... 11 Consolidation of perceptions to agree that there was election fraud.......................... 12 Keeping the movement alive in the intervening periods............................................... 13 Case study: sending 1 million SMS messages to sport program ......................................... 13 Universal recognition for the movement.......................................................................... 14 Neda’s video.................................................................................................................................. 15 Distributing independent news to Iran ............................................................................. 15 Call for action....................................................................................................................... 17 Online activists impacting the mainstream media .........................................................18 Example: VOA removing Sazegara’s program and the online protest ........................... 18 Case study: putting pressure on BBC to change their reporting...................................... 18 From a blog post to 3000 gathering in less than 9 hours....................................................... 19 When social media failed the Green movement: The Trojan Horse Strategy .................... 20 Human rights campaigns through social media............................................................. 21 Conclusions............................................................................................................................ 21 Introduction Social media played a significant role in the creation of the Green movement before and after the Iranian presidential election of June 12, 2009. Persian blog sphere helped to create the discourse for democracy, pluralism and tolerance in the years before the election. During the three months leading to the election, Internet and social media were used to campaign for the presidential candidates. Before the election, social media was used by the reformist activists to support their favorite candidates Mirhosein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi. These campaigns took place on blogs, political websites, social news aggregators (Balatarin), microblogging tools (FriendFeed and Twitter) and social networks (Facebook).In most studies done on the impact of the social media in the aftermath of the Iranian election, researchers mainly focused on the impact of Twitter, and in most cases, found little evidence to support the claims for the importance of social media. The focus on Twitter was due to several factors. The content on Twitter was primarily in English and could be easily used for text analysis without a need for Persian to English translation. Twitter also has a powerful API, which makes it easy to measure different types of activities such as number of postings and re-tweets. The State Department’s call for delaying the Twitter maintenance also resulted in overplaying the role of Twitter. Social media was important but in most cases, the activity was taking place elsewhere. In this article, I discuss how social media played a role and used different platforms to influence the events in Iran. In addition, methods Iranian government used to combat the influence of the Internet are listed. Internet Platform Description Video Platforms: Youtube, etc The video websites helped to provide evidence for the demonstrations taking place and exposed police brutality and killings. Youtube was the most popular video sharing websites. YouTube highlighted the Iranian protests on the front page of its CitizenTube during the demonstrations. Facebook Unblocking Facebook before the presidential election allowed rapid user growth and political activism on Facebook. Facebook allowed information to go from inside Iran to outside and from outside back to Iran. Twitter It did not have a large following in Iran. A handful of Iranian activists and journalists twitted what they read on the Iranian source. This allowed the international audience and reporters easily track the events in Iran. Political campaign websites in side Iran The political websites based in Iran were influential in creating the Internet activity on the social networks by providing the content to be shared and discussed. Ghalamnews and Kalame: The official websites of Mousavi were the reference point for many of the Mousavi supporters. MowjSevvom: The campaign website of