Whether you're late to the Iranian election story or you've been tracking it since day one it's getting hard to keep the news straight. The sheer volume of information is a boon both to news junkies and history- not to mention the actual effect that all those tweets may be having on the outcome of this crisis- but speed and accuracy don't always go hand in hand.
To that end we've compiled this time line of events, starting with the closing of the polls in Iran and running right up to the present. We hope that this is of more use than just another liveblog filled with posts culled from Twitter. (We've done that too).
However, as we've noted time and again, if you want the latest news from Iran you can't go wrong with Nico Pitney's liveblog at the Huffington Post. If anything we'd like this post to serve as a companion to Nico's excellent work, providing a primer that can help you catch up with the story so far.
JUNE 12
The Iranian Presidential election is held. Four candidates vie for the job, including the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (best known in the West ) and former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Moussavi. Ahmadinejad is best known in the West for his confrontational style in matters of foreign policy and Holocaust denials while opposition leader Moussavi ran on a more moderate platform that sough to expand women's rights in the Islamic Republic.
Polls taken before the election painted an uncertain picture, with some having Moussavi ahead and others suggesting that Ahmadinejad would easily be reelected.
JUNE 13
Both of the leading candidates declare victory, with Moussavi declaring himself the "absolute winner by a very large margin" while the state run news asserts that it is Ahmadinejad who is the winner.
The dueling claims set the stage for the first round of protests in Tehran, Iran's capital, with crowds starting fires.
JUNE 14
As protests continue in Tehran and across the country, the Iranian government begins to crackdown on the websites and text messaging services protest leaders are using to organize. However they fail to halt the storm of tweets coming from Tehran University and other locations around the country like this one from username @persiankiwi :
tehran is like war zone. it is unbelievable. i have not seen this for 30 years. fires everywhere. shooting, people shouting. #Iranelection
Twitter users both in Iran and across the globe pick up the stream of messages coming out of Iran with the #Iranelections hashtag (definition of hashtag), scooping mainstream news agencies on the latest from the protest scenes.
As the Iranian government seeks to seal up the social media leaks, opposition sympathizers across the globe begin to set up proxy servers to keep the news flowing. Some also begin performing distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) on Iranian government websites, but many of the protesters reporting from inside Iran ask for that practice to stop as it has a detrimental effect on overall net access in the country.
Meanwhile, some Twitter users in the U.S. decry the lack of coverage of the growing protest movement by cable news giant CNN. They launch a hashtag of their own #cnnfail to shame CNN into expanding their coverage.
June 15
Protests continue and the violence appears to get worse as this photo essay from the Boston Globe's website shows. Police and protesters clash outside the campus of Tehran University (amongst other locations) but it is the plain clothed paramilitary Basiji forces who many report to be the most dangerous element in the streets.
Iranian President Ahmadienjad heads to Russia for a scheduled regional summit.
Speculation abounds that Ayatollah Ali Khameni, the supreme leader of Iran, has made a serious political error by embracing Ahmadienjad's "victory".
“After congratulating the nation for having a sacred victory, to say now that there is a possibility that it was rigged is a big step backward for him,” said Abbas Milani, the director of Stanford University’s Iranian studies program.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden expresses some vague doubt as to the legitimacy of the elections in Iran.
The online community begins to codify the best practices in what has become a cyberwar over information access between what is believed to be Iranian government agents who are trying to silence the online presence of the opposition and sympathetic IT experts in the West.
We begin following the Twitter users @iran09, and @pinkmuslimah along with @persiankiwi for our own modest addition to the liveblogging efforts.
June 16
Graphic footage of protesters who have been shot begins to make it on to YouTube.
Supreme Leader Khameni calls for calm as more cracks show up in the Iranian power structure. (Check out this chart to see a breakdown of how power is structured in Iran)
Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, Iran's most senior cleric (but not the one with the most power, that would be Khamenei ) states that "No one one in their right mind can believe" the offical election results.
It is revealed that the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to postpone their scheduled maintenance in order to keep that line of communication with the rest of the world open.
June 17
Day of mourning: demonstrators wore black to to mourn those who lost their lives in post-election violence. The march was the largest protest since yet.
According to CNN, Moussavi’s communicates the following with his supporters via twitter: "Twenty-five percent inflation means ignorance, thieving, corruption, where is the wealth of my nation," He also went on to say, "Iran must participate in fair elections, it is a matter of national importance."
Moussavi is expected to deliver a sermon during Friday prayers at Tehran University.
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