Social Media Spreads Word Of Bin Laden's Death
BOSTON (CBS) -- How did you find out about Osama Bin Laden's death?
Many of us read the headlines on Facebook and Twitter, before tuning into the President's speech.
It all began with a Pakistani citizen tweeting in the neighborhood around Osama Bin Laden's compound. @ReallyVirtual wrote "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1am."
At that point, he had no idea he was live-tweeting about a top secret U.S. mission targeting the most wanted terrorist of our time.
WBZ-TV's Christina Hager reports.
"Before you know it, the whole world knows," explains Emerson College social media professor David Gerzof. "If the US wanted to be quiet about it, these live updates would have made that impossible."
The messages set off a firestorm of activity on Facebook and Twitter, which set a record as Obama took the podium Sunday night. There were 51,000 tweets per second being posted at that point. That beat the previous high, set during the Superbowl.
