As Mike Madden writes today in Salon, of course “social media is documenting the Iranian revolution — not leading it.” But that still requires media exposure, coordination and communication, all of which Twitter supplies in spades. No, social media will not bring down Ahmadinejad, the Iranian people can only do that. Imagine if Tom Paine in 1775 or Cory Aquino in 1987 had the one-to-many power of social networking communication instead of pamphlets and radio. Just as “Internet time” speeds up the old world, so too does social media — whether China, Iran or otherwise — provide a new and powerful tool for political revolution.

And as The Atlantic observed a year later, “the Green movement remains the first major world event broadcast worldwide almost entirely via social media.”