Iranian protests
They are protesting the former US influence/occupation and celebrating throwing us out in the '70s. And they are protesting their own government. Two for the price of one. This is The Washington Post story about the 'sort of' counter protests. It begins with a characterization of the "ritual" protests about the takeover of the US embassy. [Well, parochialism is not limited to people I do not like.]
I checked several potential search phrases.
"iran protests" was the clear winner so that is what I used.
I made the first search at about 10:00 a.m. November 5, 2009. This was not early, but the tweets went back to 3:27 a.m. on November 4. So I was back to early in the protest cycle.
The first search found 1500 messages about Iran protests. The stream seemed to have slowed down a good deal at that point.
Messages about the protest did not last very long. It was 1300 on November 4, 2009, but then it fell to about 200 for 3 days, about 100 for about 6 days, and by that point interest had waned leading to only a few tweets.
November 15, 2009 time to retire the search. The total number of messages found was 2623. The timeline was
The .txt file that can be read by Excel to acquire the data is: iran protests.txt