How Bin Laden News Exploded on Twitter: A Visualization

41 minutes ago by Chris Taylor 1

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By now it’s common knowledge that the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death broke on Twitter. Donald Rumsfeld’s Chief of Staff, the fresh-faced Keith Urbahn, was the first credible source to issue the news on Sunday at 10:24pm ET, long before President Obama spoke, and Urbahn’s tweet was the one that went viral.

All this we knew — but now, with an exhaustive analysis of 15 million tweets by New York company Social Flow, we can actually see Urbahn’s post exploding into the Twitterverse. “Within a minute, more than 80 people had already reposted the message,” the company writes in its blog post. “Within two minutes, over 300 reactions to the original post were spreading through the network.”

Social Flow’s visualization, above, also reveals a new and previously little-known player in the Urbahn tweet drama: New York Times digital media reporter Brian Stelter. He’s at the center of the second dandelion-like hub of retweets, at bottom right in the picture. Other Twitter accounts played their part in passing the news from one of these highly influential Tweeters to another, including @ObamaNews and @LaughingSquid — the latter being a San Francisco-based website full of quirky ephemera.

What can we learn from this chart? That trustworthiness, in a universe of tweeters spouting all sorts of speculation, is more important than ever. Urbahn, 27, didn’t shout about his insider connections, but enough people read his bio to understand that he was likely to have good sources inside the Pentagon. And for all the talk of Twitter making journalists of us all, it seems we still desire validation from a reporter from a major media organization.

And maybe — just maybe — the number of followers you have on Twitter matters less than who and how active they are. Urbahn didn’t have a record-breaking number of followers (who then numbered a little more than 1,000, or about 6,000 fewer than he has now), but his tweet went viral nonetheless, thanks to those followers going to bat for him. Stetler has more than 55,000 followers and tweets obsessively, but ultimately his influence was slightly less important here than Urbahn’s.

“Keith Urbahn wasn’t the first to speculate Bin Laden’s death, but he was the one who gained the most trust from the network,” writes Social Flow. “And with that, the perfect situation unfolded, where timing, the right social-professional networked audience, along with a critically relevant piece of information led to an explosion of public affirmation of his trustworthiness.”

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