Twitter Scores a News Bombshell

For the first time in history, the news networks have been beaten to a major news story by social media. It happened yesterday when Abdulkader Hariri in Raqqa, Syria tapped into his smartphone the immortal words 'Huge explosions shook the city' and Twitter followers around the world instantly found out about U.S. airstrikes hitting the country of Syria for the first time.

Those 31 characters were read and retweeted across the civilized world almost 30 minutes before U.S. Pentagon Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby stood before reporters and officially announced the operation. Upstaged, it seems, by Twitter.

Actually, this has happened before. In May 2011 when Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan, one Twitter user reported the event accidentally by tweeting an account of the military operation and mentioned a helicopter that was hovering above the city. 

But yesterday's event wasn't just an accidental tweet. Hariri was purposeful and right on target, done not as a reaction to the event but as an eyewitness reporting about something that was monumental in importance, something that reverberated to the ends of the earth on Twitter.

Welcome to the 21st Century!