Date:
Fri, 2012-04-27
Description:
Celebs like Kim Kardashian, DJ Pauly D of "Jersey Shore," and even Steve Martin played a greater role than many of us realized in spreading the word on Twitter that Osama bin Laden had been killed. A year later, researchers are studying that explosion of social media activity as a way of gauging "certainty" in an age of Internet news. Computer researchers have parsed and analyzed more than more than 600,000 tweets made last May 1. The work was done by a team of Georgia Institute of Technology researchers, along with colleagues at Microsoft Research Asia and University of California-Davis. It was a night when "more than 5,000 tweets were sent per second," and "when Twitter became the first source with news of bin Laden's death," Georgia Tech said. A team led by Mengdie Hu, a doctoral candidate at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing, wanted to distinguish rumor or "uncertain" tweets made that night from those that were "certain" regarding bin Laden's death.
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