The 2009 post-election crisis in Iran positioned Iranian unrest on front pages, newscasts, and blogs around the world, spurring intense debate and many attempts to influence the power struggle between Iranian authorities and the ‘green’ dissident movement. This paper explores how international news media converged on a narrative representing the green movement in terms of their use of popular online media, linking western news audiences to the green movement in a story of ‘common identity through common online culture’. This news narrative stresses protesters’ online media practices, especially their use of popular microblogging service Twitter, constructing a sense of proximity between western mass media audiences and the ‘green movement’. It also constitutes the conflict as international through its virtuality, spurring intervention by discursively downplaying the ‘internal affairs’ barrier against intervention, creating an issue-specific vacuum for foreign interventions on behalf of the opposition. It is argued that radically different actors sharing a perceived stake in the political properties of cyberspace used this vacuum in discursive struggle that enlarged the Iran crisis to mirror a battle for the properties and values of cyberspace, struggling over the meaning of free online speech and primacy of states and sovereignty in international relations.