The situation in Egypt was just part of a series of Middle East protests. In Iran, starting on February 14, residents in Tehran declared solidarity with Egyptian revolutionaries and began protesting there as well. Back in 2009, during an earlier set of protests, the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to postpone a planned shutdown for maintinence so that people in Tehran could tweet.
"Even if Twitter is not an out-and-out replacement for breaking news coverage by TV, it is determinedly now a big voice in real-time media criticism," James Pniewozik wrote for Time on June 15.
A BBC article the same year describes protests following an election then: "The other battleground for information of course is the internet, with Twitter coming of age as a way of disseminating information quickly and effectively."
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