Breaking news on twitter

Authors:
Mengdie Hu;Shixia Liu;Furu Wei;Yingcai Wu;John Stasko;Kwan-Liu Ma
Affiliations:
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China;University of California at Davis, Davis, California, United States;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States;University of California at Davis, Davis, California, United States
Venue:
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2012

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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.