The Egyptian Revolution, in tweets (updated)

(Updated Feb 18) Note: These data actually relate to a gathering of Twitter users in Iran, not Egypt. Apologies for the error, and thanks to the commenters for the correction.

Twitter played a significant role in the recent uprising in Egypt, with protesters communicating via tweets marked with the #25bahman hastag (February 14 in the arabic calendar) to plan and rally for the demonstration. Michael Bommarito downloaded all such tweets and plotted their frequency over time using R's ggplot2 library:

Not surprisingly, the activity peaked on February 14. The complete set of tweets would be an interesting focus for further analysis; they can be downloaded from Bommarito's post linked below.

Update: Drew Conway has used the data Bommarito provided to chart the top tweeters over time during the revolution.

Update Feb 18: As commenters have pointed out, the #25bahman hashtag

Michael Bommarito: Dataset: 5 Days of #25bahman

Comments

[lewis shepherd]

That's dramatic, yes - but couldn't the same arc be represented if the data were "mentions of Egypt on network TV news" or "stories on Mubarak in print newspapers" ... A more interesting pattern would be if there were a dramatic spike much earlier, and from Egypt locations, which would validate the incessant claim that Twitter (or other western social media) played a salient role in "sparking" or facilitating the "revolution." I find that as misleading as the use of "revolution" itself, which of course this military coup wasn't.

[David Smith]

That's the beauty of having the data available: people can do those kinds of analyses to support or refute such inferences. See for example the chart from Drew Conway linked above, and the progression of the most prolific tweeters in the days leading up to the Feb 14 demonstration.

[Mehdi]

This graph does not concern the Egyptian movement, the February 14th was the first gathering of Persian green movement afer about a year and 25 of Bahman is the equivalent of February 14th in Persian calendar. It must be noted that at February 14th the Egyption movement had finished successfully.

[Reza]

Dear David Smith,

The #25bahman hash tag refers to Persian (or Jalali) calendar which is a solar calendar. Its completely different from Hijri (Arabic) calendar which is a lunar calendar.

Persians (Iranians) speak Persian (or Farsi) but not Arabic. The months' names (and lengths) are different in Persian and Arabic. Please correct the title and text of the post, or post an update.

Thanks for your wonderful R blog.

[David Smith]

Thank you Reza and Mehdi. I've added a correction to the top of the post.