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Breaking news on twitter

Published: 05 May 2012 Publication History

Abstract

After the news of Osama Bin Laden's death leaked through Twitter, many people wondered if Twitter would fundamentally change the way we produce, spread, and consume news. In this paper we provide an in-depth analysis of how the news broke and spread on Twitter. We confirm the claim that Twitter broke the news first, and find evidence that Twitter had convinced a large number of its audience before mainstream media confirmed the news. We also discover that attention on Twitter was highly concentrated on a small number of "opinion leaders" and identify three groups of opinion leaders who played key roles in spreading the news: individuals affiliated with media played a large part in breaking the news, mass media brought the news to a wider audience and provided eager Twitter users with content on external sites, and celebrities helped to spread the news and stimulate conversation. Our findings suggest Twitter has great potential as a news medium.

References

[1]
Breaking Bin Laden. http://blog.socialflow.com/post/5246404319/breaking-bin-laden-visualizing-the-power-of-a-single.
[2]
How the Bin Laden Announcement Leaked Out. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/how-the-osama-announcement-leaked-out/.
[3]
Twitter: Last night saw the highest sustained rate of Tweets ever. From 10:45 - 2:20am ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second . http://twitter.com/#!/twitterglobalpr/status/65125115272249344.
[4]
Associated Press reporters told off for Tweeting. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15772243.
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Twitter just had its CNN moment. http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-just-had-its-cnn-moment-2011-5.
[6]
Geisser, S. Predictive Inference: An Introduction. CRC Press, 1993.
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Lessons from the Osama bin Laden coverage. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/09/lessons-from-bin-laden-coverage.
[8]
Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., and Tseng, B. Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. In Proc. webKDD/SNA-KDD '07, ACM press (2007), 56--65.
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Kwark, H., Lee, C., Park, H., and Moon, S. What is twitter, a social network or a news media? In Proc. WWW '10, ACM Press (2010), 591--600.
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Leskovec, J., Backstrom, L., and Kleinberg, J. Meme-tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, KDD '09, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2009), 497--506.
[11]
Why All the Hyperventilating About Twitter 'Breaking' Bin Laden's Death Is Total Nonsense. http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/twitter-broke-news-bin-laden-s-death-nonsense/227327/.
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10 news stories that broke on Twitter first. http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/10-news-stories-that-broke-on-twitter-first-719532.
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Tsagkias, M., de Rijke, M., and Weerkamp, W. Linking online news and social media. In Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining, WSDM '11, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2011), 565--574.
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Wu, S., Hofman, J. M., Manson, W. A., and Watts, D. J. Who says what to whom on twitter. In Proc. IW3C2 '01, ACM Press (2011), 705--714.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2012
    3276 pages
    ISBN:9781450310154
    DOI:10.1145/2207676
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 05 May 2012

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    2. opinion leaders
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    • (2024)Filter-based Stance Network for Rumor VerificationACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/364946242:4(1-28)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2024
    • (2024)Testing the Test: Observations When Assessing Visualization Literacy of Domain Experts2024 IEEE Evaluation and Beyond - Methodological Approaches for Visualization (BELIV)10.1109/BELIV64461.2024.00017(106-114)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Understanding the role of media in the formation of public sentiment towards the policeCommunications Psychology10.1038/s44271-024-00059-82:1Online publication date: 7-Feb-2024
    • (2024)The speed of news in Twitter (X) versus radioScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-024-61921-714:1Online publication date: 24-May-2024
    • (2024)Patterns of partisan toxicity and engagement reveal the common structure of online political communication across countriesNature Communications10.1038/s41467-024-53868-015:1Online publication date: 14-Nov-2024
    • (2024)Will Creative Labor Lost Their Jobs? A Social Informatics Study of the “No to AI Generated Images” CampaignInformation Management10.1007/978-3-031-64359-0_8(93-105)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2024
    • (2023)Between Calls for Action and Narratives of Denial: Climate Change Attention Structures on TwitterMedia and Communication10.17645/mac.v11i1.611111:1(278-292)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
    • (2023)Event detection from real-time twitter streaming data using community detection algorithmMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-023-16263-383:8(23437-23464)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2023
    • (2022)From Indymedia to Tahrir SquareProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202210.1145/3485447.3512282(3465-3470)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2022
    • (2022)Real-Time Visual Analysis of High-Volume Social Media PostsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2021.311480028:1(879-889)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
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