Twitter first to news again as Urbahn Tweet confirms Bin Laden death
Word of Osama bin Laden’s death spread on Twitter about 45 minutes before President Barack Obama announced that the U.S. had killed the terrorist leader.
According to The New York Times’ Brian Stelter, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer tweeted just after 9:45 p.m. Sunday, “POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10:30 PM Eastern Time.”
The first credible information that Obama would announce bin Laden’s death came at 10:25 p.m. from Keith Urbahn, chief of staff for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumfeld. Urbahn tweeted, “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.”
Within minutes, CBS News Capitol Hill producer Jill Jackson tweeted confirmation:
With cable news anchors afraid to confirm the news of bin Laden’s death before they had multiple sources of their own — Twitter quickly backed up with more confirmations, from senior administration officials and others — newspapers quickly jumped ahead of the story.
It wasn’t until about 10 minutes to 11 p.m. that CNN’s viewers learned that bin Laden had been killed earlier in the evening.
Silicon Alley Insider's west coast editor Matt Rosoff then declared that “Twitter just had its CNN moment.”
A few hours after Obama’s speech, Twitter users discovered that Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant in Abbottabad, had tweeted about a helicopter hovering overhead in the middle of the night, followed by a blast. He apparently was live-tweeting the raid on bin Laden’s compound.