The Iranian presidential election of 2009 was plagued with controversy, anger and mass protesting. When the tumultuous election was over, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been elected president, and political shock waves swept the country. The victory announcement surprised Ahmadinejad's opposition and caused widespread public frustration.
One of Ahmadinejad's greatest competitors, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and his followers, immediately disputed the results and angry protests began to mushroom across Iran"(Khosronejad, 396). Many Iranians supported the protests and assumed the votes were fraudulent. In reaction, Iranian government and authorities took a repressive respond of the regime. However, the protesters widely took benefits of social networking tools and communication technologies to reveal the regime's brutality through posting photos and video footage taken by mobile phones on the Internet. The election was of much importance to the western world due to a number of issues including: protests grew in large-scale, extensive use of mobile phones and the Internet, the repressive regime of Iranian government and president.
In the beginning the protests tended to start spontaneously, "street protests were so large, crowds so enthusiastic and the opposition so steadfast that it seemed as Iran was on the brink of a significant change in its way of doing business"(Khosronejad, 398). It was the second enormous and abnormal revolution since 1979 Islamic Revolution, but information tools and communication technologies became the most important cornerstones in this revolution. Those protesters frequently post information, videos, and opinions on such social networking websites like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, etc. "When an organization is the only source of information about a crisis, there is less reputation damage than if news media are the first to deliver the information"(Khosronejad, 398).
