Twitter as a News Feed: Spreading the News of bin Laden’s Death
Social networking has allowed news to spread faster than ever before, especially in the case of Twitter. Twitter is a social networking site where users can post short 140 character messages (tweets) to be instantly viewed by that user’s followers, wherever they are in the world. Twitter is special in that in order to follow someone, you (usually) do not need to seek approval from that user, making connecting to other users quick and easy. Many celebrities, journalists, or other people “in the know” frequently update Twitter accounts and send tweets that are followed by thousands of people. Many of these important people will go to Twitter first to spread their news, allowing their thousands of followers to receive information quicker than sending the news to a major news outlet. Twitter, in its short five year history, has already been responsible for spreading news about numerous major news events to people all over the world faster than mainstream media outlets.
In the case of Osama bin Laden’s killing in May of 2011, Keith Urbahn (@KeithUrbahn), former chief of staff to Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted at 10:25 EST that night: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.” Shortly afterwards, Brian Stelter, a reporter for the New York Times, retweeted that tweet and the news quickly spread to Stelter’s 50 thousand followers and beyond to the rest of the internet. It took over one hour later until President Obama got on the mainstream media and confirmed the news in a presidential address. Keith Urbahn was not the first person to tweet about the news (the first was around 9:45 EST), however, he was the first credible and reputable source which is why his tweet spread the information much more effectively than earlier tweets.
Twitter has become more effective in spreading news than major news outlets mostly because of the popularity of the social networking site among “important people” as a tool to spread information. The ease of connection and communication along with the instantaneous nature of the transfer of tweets allows messages to spread quicker than ever before. One can view Twitter users as nodes in a gigantic network, and following other users creates a directed edge from the follower to the followee. More popular and important Twitter users, in this case Keith Urbahn and Brian Stelter, have thousands of edges linking their messages to their following users. In turn, many of these followers also have many of their own followers which creates many more edges to that follower. If an “important person follower” retweets the original message, all of their followers get indirectly connected to that important person as well, creating a longer path between these secondary followers and the original tweeter. It is easy to see how one tweet can spread information so quickly if the person is credible and well followed/connected, especially since reading and writing a tweet both take very little time and effort compared to that of sending news to a major news outlet (which have to get fact checked and then processed for broadcasting). In the article linked below, more information about how the bin Laden news was spread so quickly from Urbahn’s tweet is provided. The article also shows a graph depicting a network of all of the tweets that were connected to the original tweet.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20060794-93.html