Bin Laden and the speed of news

Osama bin Laden was gunned down at one of the early morning of May 2 in Abbottabad (Pakistan) , ten in the evening of May 1 in Madrid. The exact timing of the operation, when helicopters fly over the stage and when the first explosion occurs are listed in Twitter by Sohaib Athar , a software consultant from Pakistan, although even he really knew what had been reported until about six hours later.

The official announcement by the President of the United States , Barack Obama, was in a televised speech to the nation about six hours after the operation, at 22:30 on 1 May, when the U.S. east coast, the 4:30 am on Day 2 in Spain. The news had leaked out five minutes earlier, again in Twitter , by Keith Urbahn , Chief of Staff to former Secretary of State for Defence, Donald Rumsfeld. And the Wikipedia was updated with the data from the death of bin Laden exactly seven minutes later , at 2:37 UTC, 4:37 am Spain time. Ten minutes later, was also modified in the Spanish edition .

At that speed, there is not much time to check anything. The online editions of several newspapers illustrated the story with a built fake photo using Photoshop , which had been used as early as April 2009 , and was widely mistaken for a news agency. O is produced typographical errors worthy of an anthology of nonsense . It is with this kind of news of global importance when one can really appreciate the speed of today's world: a military operation takes place in Pakistan in middle of the night, and is discussed in real time, as it happens, by a user of Twitter I was there. The news that the operation produced is filtered Twitter about six hours later, minutes before the official announcement. Seven minutes later, already included in the encyclopedia .