Dwindling Osama bin Laden Tweets and the RT Champs

The running count in my DiscoverText “bin Laden” project is ~4.5 million unsharable Tweets. Though we can’t share them, we can describe them.

One of the interesting features of this dataset is the rapidly dwindling Tweet rate over the month of May. At the peak, we were looking at hundreds of thousands of Tweets per day, and over the last four days in May the total never crossed 15,000.

If you tag cloud the archive with 2.4 million bin Laden Tweets, this is what you see:

Some of the champions in the Re-Tweet derby (with the # of RTs we captured shown in parentheses):

RT @workforfood: ☑ Saddam Hussein ☑ Osama Bin Laden ☐ Internet Explorer (via @dudup) (2,053)

RT @TititicaReaI: CD DO BIN LADEN: 01 – Grenade ; 02 – Firework ; 03 – Dynamite ; 04 – Airplanes ; 05 – Blow ; 06 – Toxic ; 07 – Party in The USA (2,060)

RT @omgfacts: Bin Laden’s death was announced on May 1st, 2011. Hitler’s death was announced on May 1st, 1945. (2,396)

RT @sickipediabot: So Osama Bin Laden is dead… Amazing what the Americans can do when the Playstation Network is down. (2,512)

RT @jimmyfallon: Buried at sea? Tough year for the ocean-BP, Japan radiation & now “Hey mind if we put Bin Laden in here?” #FallonMono (3,948)

RT @TWlTTERWHALE: Please do not click on any links saying Osama Bin Laden EXECUTION Video! This is a virus that hacks accounts. RETWEET! (4,144)

The four largest RT sets were a single hoax post with a variety of now expired bit.ly URLs pointing to the “server at re-login.twitter.w2c.ru.”