Arguably the most famous person in the recent extraordinary protests in Iran is not a person at all but a Twitter avatar named Mousavi1388.

In 140-characters-or-less bursts, supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi—the opposition candidate in Iran’s recent, all-but-certainly hijacked election—have issued continuous virtual instructions in his name to rally, shout, and challenge the authoritarian regime in Tehran.

Meanwhile, Mousavi’s Facebook page, which is in Farsi and English, has amassed nearly 60,000 supporters worldwide.

And as the mullahs have increasingly restricted the freedom of Western and Iranian journalists—essentially forbidding them from covering the massive, bracing, countrywide demonstrations—amateurs and professionals alike have turned to Web 2.0 tools to get their message out.

So powerful has Twitter proven in particular that the State Department reportedly asked the site, which was planning to go down for maintenance earlier this week during daylight hours in Tehran, to keep its lines open. (Sadly, this marks probably the only helpful step the Obama administration has taken during the weeklong movement.)

For its part, Twitter denies receiving any outright pressure from the U.S. government. Biz Stone, the company’s cofounder, blogged that “the State Dept does not have access to our decision making process.”

Stone added, “when we worked with our network provider to reschedule this planned maintenance, we did so because events in Iran were tied directly to the growing significance of Twitter as an important communication and information network.”

Meanwhile, a YouTube spokesman compared the situation “to the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic where all these barriers are placed in front of people and they keep marching. Only this time it’s happening online and it’s happening on YouTube.”

In 140-characters-or-less bursts, supporters of Mousavi have issued continuous virtual instructions in his name to rally, shout, and challenge the authoritarian regime in Tehran.

Technology has also allowed the nascent Iranian revolution to spread globally. Blogs, Twitterers, and Facebook profiles sympathetic to the opposition have turned themselves green, the color of the Mousavists.

Six members of the Iranian national soccer team defied authorities by wearing green wristbands during a match earlier this week (they were forced to remove them at halftime).

And, in a meta-moment, one of my own Twitter followers, responding to my tweet about working on this article, “re-tweeted” me some powerful pictures of Wednesday’s marches.

Some observers have questioned the accuracy of Web tools in reporting news from Iran. And, of course, far from all of the tweets about the crisis have been substantiated. But this confuses the organizational role of instruments like Twitter with their not-fully-realized potential for actual reportage. This is why blogs tracking developments in Tehran have had to labor to verify the accuracy of YouTube videos and pictures posted by the opposition.

Of course, the regime is doing its darndest to suppress these developments. The AP reported that the Revolutionary Guard has dictated that “Iranian Web sites and bloggers must remove any materials that ‘create tension’ or face legal action.” And one Harvard technology researcher, Hal Roberts, believes the government has “done a pretty good job of blocking its citizens’ Web requests to sites that it does not want them to see, including during the current crisis.”

Blogs, Twitterers, and Facebook profiles sympathetic to the opposition have turned themselves green, the color of the Mousavists.

The mullahs have also employed a tech arsenal to battle back. The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka and Ali Alfoneh wrote in the New York Times that that Revolutionary Guard is “reportedly using Facebook and Twitter to locate” dissidents. Other blog-o-sleuths have caught Ahmedinejad’s people Photoshopping extras into pictures of his rallies to make them look bigger.

Still, even the countermeasures have countermeasures. Opposition movement members and their supporters have urged Twitterers around the world to set their location and time for Tehran in order to confuse the authorities. Others stateside have set up proxy addresses to enable Iranians on the ground to transmit their messages anonymously. Roberts notes that Twitter’s decentralized structure allows users to bypass restrictions.

So the battle wages on, not only in Iranian city squares but also across Web 2.0. My suggestion would be to stay current by following Mousavi1388.

Michael M. Rosen, a contributor to The American, is an attorney in San Diego.

Image by Darren Wamboldt/Bergman Group.