After the controversial victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 Iranian presidential election, the people of Iran took to the streets in what has become known as the Green Revolution. It could just as well have been called the Twitter Rebellion. As protests within Iran grew louder, the authorities there struggled to block news from reaching the outside world. British newspaper The Telegraph reported: “Iran’s regime was doing its utmost to choke off the flow of news from its capital.” Foreign journalists were expelled, satellite transmissions were jammed, websites were blocked and newspapers were censored. Yet the people had a power of their own: the ability to use their mobile phones to video-record scenes of the protest and governmental retaliation and transmit the images to the world over the Internet. All good, except the government was doing all it could to block servers and Internet access.

Enter Austin Heap, a 25-year-old sitting at home on a Saturday night in San Francisco. He began receiving tweets about the protests and the U.S. mainstream media’s failure to adequately cover the event. Then came news that the Iranian government was successfully blocking relays, effectively cutting off much of the outgoing Twitter traffic. In his words, Heap “found a way around the restrictions, creating proxy servers and hiding encrypted data inside official Iranian government Internet traffic.” Then came an assist from the U.S. State Department, which asked Twitter to delay a planned daylong maintenance shutdown in order that the protesters not be silenced. Eventually, supporters in more than a hundred cities around the world took to the streets in a show of support for the Iranian people. The genie was out of the bottle and could not be shoved back in.

A year later, a documentary about the events of June 2009 aired on America’s HBO network. Available in three languages (English, Farsi, and Arabic), the film, For Neda, was put into multiple formats in order to be viewable on virtually any device. Says Heap: “There is even a version specially designed to be shared via Bluetooth—from cell phone to cell phone—in Iran.”

A new generation. A new form of revolution, courtesy of social media.