The loss of Michael Jackson has touched so many across the globe. It’s been the hot topic of conversation for people of all ages, and those conversations have exploded in the social media world. More and more frequently, today’s news is being discussed in social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook as it happens.
On Thursday, Mashable noted that according to the Twitter tracking tool Twist, at least 30% of Tweets were about the star’s tragic passing, which was probably an underestimate. Even fellow celebrities used Twitter to express their feelings over MJ’s passing. Immediately following the news, TweetVolume noted that "Michael Jackson" appeared in more than 66,500 Twitter updates. And according to TechCrunch nine out of ten of the trending topics on Twitter that day were MJ-related. Twitter even had to remove features like Search on its main site to stay afloat. Not surprising, Twitter suffered under the traffic and the familiar fail whale made its appearance.
Other social media sites hosted their share of the news as well. Less than an hour after Jackson's death had been confirmed, more than 500 groups remembering Michael Jackson appeared on Facebook, some with more than 50,000 members. YouTube spotlighted his most memorable videos and linked to MJ’s channel, which had more than 9 million views as of Friday.
While social media outlets may be hosting conversations about big news stories, the sites are still not credited as valid sources in line with traditional trusted media outlets. As we saw with MJ’s passing, the LA Times was most frequently noted as the source, although TMZ.com had reported the story hours earlier. Although mainstream America was hesitant to believe the blog, breaking the MJ news is still being viewed as a turning point for TMZ’s questionable credibility, in addition to bringing the blog a much higher level of recognition.
Both of the sites credited for breaking and confirming the news, TMZ and LA Times had such a rush of visitors, their sites went down. The LA Times had 2.3 million page views in just one hour -- the highest traffic the newspaper has ever experienced in such a small amount of time. Other major news cites including CBS, ABC and AOL, slowed considerably. The evening the news broke, the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds. Even Google experienced difficulties with the millions of mass searches for MJ news. Wikipedia editors were eventually forced to lock out changes to Jackson's page until hard news sites verified his death, with so many people trying to update his page.
Social media is becoming such a big part of people’s everyday lives. In the face of MJ’s tragic passing, people flooded social media sites for updates on the latest news, to share their sadness and fond memories and to remember his great work. This sad news showed what a big part social media plays in our lives, where people turn to when something happens and how we’ve become increasingly more connected to these sites and to each other through them. It will now be up to these social media outlets to help the technology catch up to its following, to better support the onslaught of activity under such circumstances.
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