Breaking news on Twitter

Mengdie Hu Georgia Tech

Shixia Liu MSR Asia

Furu Wei MSR Asia

Yingcai Liu UC Davis

John Stasko Georgia Tech

Kwan-Liu Ma UC Davis

Twitter broke Osama Bin Laden’s death

http://www.flickr.com/photos/twitteroffice/5681263084

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Twitter broke Osama Bin Laden’s death

http://www.flickr.com/photos/twitteroffice/5681263084

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9:45 pm: White House announces Pres. Obama speech

10:24 pm: Keith Urbahn tweets about Osama rumor

Twitter broke Osama Bin Laden’s death

http://www.flickr.com/photos/twitteroffice/5681263084

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Twitter broke Osama Bin Laden’s death

http://www.flickr.com/photos/twitteroffice/5681263084

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10:45 pm: ABC, NBC & CBS report Bin Laden’s death

Twitter broke Osama Bin Laden’s death

http://www.flickr.com/photos/twitteroffice/5681263084

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11:30 pm: Pres. Obama begins remarks

Prior Analysis

• Brian Stelter (New York Times): How the Bin Laden Announcement Leaked Out

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/how-the-osama-announcement-leaked-out/

• Gilad Lotan (SocialFlow): Breaking Bin Laden: Visualizing the Power of a Single Tweet

http://blog.socialflow.com/post/5246404319/breaking-bin-laden-visualizing-the-power-of-a-single

• Frédéric Filloux (Guardian): Lessons from the Osama bin Laden Coverage

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/09/lessons-from-bin-laden-coverage

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/twitteroffice/5681263084

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Data

Data

http://www.flickr.com/photos/twitteroffice/5681263084

• May 1st 10:20 pm EST – May 2nd 12:20 am EST • “laden” • 614,976 tweets • Sampled (roughly 10%)

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Did Twitter Break the news?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/twitteroffice/5681263084

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Tweets posted between 10:20 and 10:45 pm

News breakers

@jacksonjk: Jill Jackson – CBS News Capitol Hill producer @keithurbahn: Keith Urbahn - Chief of staff of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld @brianstelter: Brian Stelter – New York Times reporter

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22:21 22:23 22:25 22:28 22:30 22:33 22:35 22:37 22:39 22:41 22:43 22:45

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@keithurbahn

@jacksonjk

@brianstelter

News breakers

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22:21 22:23 22:25 22:28 22:30 22:33 22:35 22:37 22:39 22:41 22:43 22:45

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@keithurbahn

@jacksonjk

@brianstelter

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10:24 pm 10:32 pm

Did Twitter convince its audience?

• All English Tweets in data set: 420,134

• Certainty classification – Certain: They caught Osama Bin Laden!

– Uncertain: Rumor, Bin Laden dead. Don’t know for sure.

– Irrelevant: Obama: "the US is not – and never will be – at war with Islam…Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer...“

• Classifier – Training set: 300 tweets, 2 raters agreed on 235 (78.3%)

– SVM with bag-of-words as features

– Cross-validation: 75.8% overall confidence

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Did Twitter convince its audience?

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ABC, NBC and CBS Keith Urbahn Obama speech

Did Twitter convince its audience?

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29.91% tweets @keithurbahn contains “Rumsfeld” 18.61% tweets @jacksonjk contains “CBS” 20.74% tweets @briansteler contains “NYT”

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ABC, NBC and CBS Keith Urbahn Obama speech

Who generated the buzz?

• 100 accounts mentioned in 18.10% of sampled tweets

Mainstream media 26 @cnn, @nytimes, @cnnbrk

Media people 18 @jacksonjk, @brianstelter

Twitter celebrities 16 @nzafro, @yourfavwhiteguy

Real-life celebrities 15 @stevemartintogo, @kimkardashianb

Blogs 6 @realmorte, @ugglytruth

Political people & org 4 @barackobama, @whitehouse

“Osama”, “Jesus” 4 @real_bin_laden, @osamabinladen

News aggregators 3 @breakingnews, @usabreakingnews

Others 5 @jtalarico328, @realliltunechii

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Who generated the buzz?

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22:21 22:43 22:57 23:09 23:21 23:32 23:45 23:57 0:14

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mass media

media people

celebrities

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What did people share?

• 9.69% tweets contain links

• Top 26 sites made up 58.8% of total valid links

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URL number / tweet number

0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 4500

cnn.com

msn.com

nytimes.com

twitpic.com

yfrog.com

globo.com

twitlonger.com

youtube.com

tumblr.com

reuters.com

tmi.me

lockerz.com

mashable.com

go.com

bbc.co.uk

wsj.com

facebook.com

whitehouse.gov

huffingtonpost.com

aljazeera.net

yahoo.com

google.com

foxnews.com

uol.com.br

blogspot.com

globovision.com

Mass media and government 64.07%

Video & image sharing, social networks, blogs and tweet-shortening services

35.93%

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Discussion

• People are willing to trust information from social media – if the sources are credible

• Concentration of attention on “elite users”

• Different groups of elite users play different parts

• Journalists utilize personal social media accounts to “break” news

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Associated Press Staff Scolded for Tweeting Too Quickly About OWS Arrests The official rules note, "Don’t break news that we haven’t published, no matter the format." (Reuters spells out the same idea plainly in their handbook: "Don't scoop the wire.") Instead of getting "caught in the moment," the AP's freewheeling tweeters are urged in the e-mail to run "sensitive official AP business" through editors and corporate communications. The AP's social media guidelines were recently updated to insist, "Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day.” http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/11/ap-staff-scolded-for-tweeting-about-ows-arrests.html

Breaking news guidance for BBC journalists “But we've been clear that our first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible - and certainly not after it reaches Twitter.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2012/02/twitter_guidelines_for_bbc_jou.html