Bin Laden or Beyonce? The stories that set Twitter alight

Nearly 9,000 tweets per second were sent when the former Destiny’s Child singer made her news public at the MTV Video Music Awards. The previous highest tweets per second (TPS) record was set during the women’s football World Cup final earlier this year, when Japan beat the USA.

Official Twitter figures show the Japan earthquake and tsunami in March triggered 5,530 tweets per second – 773 fewer than Wayne Rooney’s equalising goal against Barcelona in the Uefa Champions League final in May.

Although Osama Bin Laden’s death only comes 10th in the TPS list, it prompted the highest-ever sustained tweet rate. Twitter averaged 3,440 tweets per second between 03.45am and 05.30am GMT on the night the news was announced.

Fake accounts

But are the records a reliable indicator of the sort of news stories people are interested in? Some people remain sceptical – not about Twitter’s importance in delivering information quickly but about the quality of the measurements it produces.

“Twitter is an extremely useful mechanism, which is able to deliver information and ideas through a human filter,” Joanne Jacobs, an expert in social networking technologies, told Channel 4 News.

“But those tweeting records are a complete fallacy to believe because it is so easy to affect those results simply by using fake accounts.”

Twitter record

Twitter is nonetheless part of the daily life of the world. It contributed to the “Arab Spring” revolutions, and now has a place in Guinness World Records.

In March, the actor Charlie Sheen achieved the rare honour of becoming the fastest person to reach one million Twitter followers. Sheen joined Twitter on 1 March, and within minutes he had acquired more than 60,000 followers – without even tweeting.

Twitter, which is five years old, now has more than 200 million users, who send more than 140 million tweets a day – or just under one billion per week. By contrast, it took more than three years and two months to reach its first one billion tweets.