The news of Osama bin Laden’s death shook the world last night. And it comes as no surprise that the news was widely discussed on Twitter even before President Obama’s announcement. According to The New York Times, the White House made an announcement at 9:45pm that the President would address the nation later in the evening. Speculation that the announcement would be about bin Laden did not air in television immediately. Speculation did, however, erupt in the social mediasphere.
I’m sure many of you have read about how Keith Urbahn, the former chief of staff for Donald Rumsfeld, was the first to leak the news on Twitter. What you may not know is that before the President had even spoken, the news was spreading virally. Prior to the 11:35pm announcement, more than a dozen Facebook posts with the word “bin Laden” were being posted every single second.
During the President’s speech, Twitter reached more than 4,000 tweets per second. Once the President’s announcement confirmed the rumors, people began using social media channels to educate and drive real world action. Thousands gathered outside of the White House and at Ground Zero. Google Maps was updated to include the location of bin Laden’s death. Bloggers provided instant analysis of the ramifications bin Laden’s death might have for the War on Terror and Obama’s presidency. Overall, this unexpected event late on Sunday evening lead to a bigger traffic spike than the much-anticipated royal wedding.
What does this event tell us about the future of news? According to GigaOM, we can extract seven stages of news in a Twitter and Facebook era: excitement, uncertainty, searching for validation, confirmation, jokes/profits/platitudes, action, and real analysis. As Stacey Higgenbotham writes, “As journalists, we often get scoops or hear of news and have to make a similar set of judgments before reporting it, but on Twitter, what often starts out as gossip now has the weight of news.”
While it’s true that the democratization of information means that we must be more cautious than ever when getting news from the Internet, the death of bin Laden confirms, once again, that social media is not just a place to tell the world what you ate for breakfast. Not only is real, important news being discussed on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other social channels, it is being discussed there before traditional media even “breaks” the story.
How many of you found out about bin Laden’s death from Twitter or Facebook and not from the evening news?
I had the news (CNN-US) and Twitter running simultaneously. The first source that reported the news would be OBL’s death was actually a British journalist I follow on Twitter. Within minutes, more US sources on Twitter were reporting the same, and CNN lagged by several minutes from the sources on Twitter. Fascinating to watch the events unfold, and even more fascinating seeing how people experienced a shared event.