Abstract
‘Helicopter hovering over Abbottabad at lam (is a rare event)’, tweeted Sohaib Athar on 2 May 2011. Other tweets quickly followed: the helicopters (he quickly realised there were more than one) were non-Pakistani, there was a window-shaking explosion, a ‘gun fight’, a crash and an army cor. don.1 Athar was live tweeting an operation that had been planned and executed in the darkest depths of secrecy: the US SEAL raid on the home of Osama bin Laden. It was Twitter’s CNN moment — the emergence of a new and significant channel for people to report on, and learn about, important events.2
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Notes
Described in Stuart Allen, Citizen Witnessing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), pp.1–4.
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of the Constabulary, The Rules of Engagement: A Review of the August 2011 Disorders (London: Crown Copyright, 2011), http://www.hmic.gov.uk/media/a-review-of-the~august-201 l-disorders-20111220.pdf, p.36.
For an analysis of the usefulness of the twitcident following the 22 May killing of Lee Rigby in Woolwich, London, see Jamie Bartlett and Carl Miller, @metpoliceuk (London: Demos, 2013).
See David Omand, Jamie Bartlett and Carl Miller, intelligence (London: Demos, 2012)
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© 2014 Simon Wibberley and Carl Miller
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Wibberley, S., Miller, C. (2014). Detecting Events from Twitter: Situational Awareness in the Age of Social Media. In: Hobbs, C., Moran, M., Salisbury, D. (eds) Open Source Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century. New Security Challenges. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353320_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353320_9
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