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Project for Excellence in Journalism
Social Media React to bin Laden's Death
The killing of Osama bin Laden accounted for 80% of the news links on blogs last week, making it the biggest single-week news topic discussed in the blogosphere since the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism began tracking blogs in January 2009. The bin Laden conversation also accounted for fully half (50%) of the news links on Twitter from May 2 to May 6. That would register it as one of the top 10 Twitter stories in the past two years.
After a full week, social media continued to discuss bin Laden's death in much the way PEJ found they had after the first three days. In a special report on May 5, PEJ reported that on blogs, the leading topic was a narrative account of the dramatic May 1 raid in Pakistan while humor and jokes constituted the largest response on Facebook and Twitter. For the rest of the week, those basic outlines remained, although attention to both those themes diminished.
And while bloggers and Twitter and Facebook users were busy sharing and disseminating new developments in the basic narrative throughout the week, there was also substantial skepticism in the online platforms about whether the al Qaeda leader had actually been killed in the May 1 raid.
In the blogosphere, attention was divided as eight different themes accounted for between 7% and 13% of the conversation. That included the question of whether President Bush or President Obama deserved credit for the bin Laden mission, but also straight narrative accounts, the impact on the U.S. relationship with Pakistan and the effect on the U.S. economy. And about one-quarter of the bloggers' conversation involved either fears of terrorist retaliation or conspiracy theories.
On Twitter and Facebook, where posts are shorter and are often made up of instantaneous reactions, discussion of conspiracy theories and hoaxes emerged as the No. 2 theme, right behind the humor thread.
As the week progressed, the percentage of posts made up of jokes fell significantly while the segment devoted to straight accounts of the May 1 raid increased, ultimately finishing the week as the third-biggest topic. And as is often the case, Twitter users also became more focused on the role social media was playing.
In addition to PEJ's regular method of tracking social media that makes up the weekly NMI, this report includes data derived using computer technology by Crimson Hexagon that examined more 160,000 blog posts, and 7.8 million posts on Twitter or Facebook from May 1 through May 8. (Note: Facebook posts are not typically included in PEJ's social media analysis.) While PEJ's NMI tracks links from social media posts to news articles as one way to follow online interest, Crimson Hexagon's software is able to divide a much wider range of posts into themes, regardless of whether the piece of media has a link or not.