What Effect Did Twitter Have on The News?
Two events in this past week, made Twitter shine with the news of the Royal Wedding and then on Sunday when the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death was leaked by Donald Rumsfeilds staffer and that started a firestorm of events on Twitter. Before anyone knew what officially was going on in there was a IT Consultant in Abbottabad Pakistan on Twitter that goes by the Twitter handle @ReallyVirtual.
At about 1AM on May 1, Sohaib tweeted complaining about the disturbance a helicopter was making nearby. “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event),” he wrote. “Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/”
“A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad…” the information-technology consultant continued. “I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S”
Within an hour, Sohaib mused that the helicopter didn’t belong to Pakistan or the Taliban. “Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicpoters, and since they’re saying it was not “ours”, so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad” he tweeted.
After hours of speculating why helicopters were over Abbottabad, Sohaid finally connected the night’s events with the fact that the United States and President Barack Obama were behind that raid that left bin Laden dead.
“Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it,” Sohaid wrote. “I need to sleep, but Osama had to pick this day to die :-/”
Because of his tweets, Sohaib now has a remarkable 40,000 + followers on Twitter.
Sohaib last tweeted on May 2: “Bin Laden is dead. I didn’t kill him. Please let me sleep now.”
Twitter has released the stats from Sunday night, and we can see the effects of the news in a 2 hour period. At the peak there were 5,106 tweets per second, just shy of the record of 5,530 from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.
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