Chart: Just How Big a Twitter Event Was Bin Laden's Death?

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Dylan C. Lathrop
Editorial Design Director

May 3, 2011 • 9:00 am PDT
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Here's what the volume of Osama Bin Laden-related tweets looked like on Sunday night around the time of the official announcement of his death:

And for comparison's sake, here's what the volume of Super Bowl-related tweets looked like over the course of three hours on Sunday, January 19:

Then we took the Super Bowl tweets-per-second graph and overlayed it with the Bin Laden tweets-per-second graph:

A few things to note: The Super Bowl is one of the most-watched sporting events in the world, with weeks of build-up, whereas the Bin Laden announcement was a breaking-news story. Also we didn't account for Twitter's growth in the three months between these two events. Still, the numbers are pretty staggering, and lend a new perspective to the social-media conversation around Bin Laden's death. It was huge.

Charts provided by Miguel Rios, an engineer at Twitter. Big hat tip to that guy.

Posted in: Technology

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