Osama Bin Laden News: Twitter for the Win

This is why Twitter is not about what you had for lunch. I learned that Osama Bin Laden was most likely dead on Twitter Sunday night at 10:30 pm, an hour before the President’s speech on television and 15 minutes before CNN confirmed the news.

I then hopped on Facebook and started telling my friends to turn on the TV. But I had the news from Twitter first of any of my friends, and I had it from journalists and people trained in separating fact from fiction.

Twitter for the win. Need any more reasons to join?

There is simply no better real-time news source these days. Political uprisings, disasters, dramatic historic news. If you want a head start, get a Twitter account and follow some folks—news organizations, reporters, friends, etc.

Yes, you will see a lot of rumor and guesswork, but through crowdsourcing you will also start to see confirmations and a sharper picture emerge.

Just remember to keep a level head until news has been confirmed and don’t tweet anything as fact unless it’s been cross-checked by multiple reputable sources, as I wrote regarding Japan.

I appreciated that CNN didn’t speculate about what the President was going to talk about until the news had been confirmed. That’s their role as a news organization. However I also appreciated that I had a head start from Twitter about what the news might’ve been.

The New York Times and Atlantic have more on how the news spread on Twitter. And Mashable offers a nifty timeline of tweets showing how the news unfolded.

Another reason I love Twitter and Facebook: the feeling of community at times like these. My husband wasn’t home for most of the hour as I was waiting for the President’s speech, but I shared the moment with people all over the country and world. News, insights, humor—they were all there for me to read and benefit from, on Twitter from experts and on Facebook from my friends and family.

This is truly a global moment and I experienced it globally—not just uni-directionally from the television, but interactively between me and the world community, thanks to social media.

Get more social media, technology, and writing tidbits from me on Twitter, @evakl.

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