What if Osama had Twitter?

By the time President Obama faced the camera to announce a key victory in the war on terror, he had already been upstaged by Twitter. Keith Urbahn, chief of staff to the former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had got wind of something a couple of hours previously. "So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn,” he tweeted.

And Obama would be outpaced again later that night by the tweets of Sohaib Athar (aka @reallyvirtual). While the US President gave spare details of the raid, Athar, an IT consultant who had moved from Lahore to Abbottabad for some peace, had written a firsthand account of his irritation at the sound of advancing helicopters. He identified them as non-Pakistani and even noted one of them crashing—something the White House refrained from mentioning for a while yet—without knowing its global significance.

Chris Applegate, a London social media geek on holiday in New York found Athar’s posts and connected them with Obama’s announcement. A couple of retweets later and the audience for Athar's sightings multiplied from his 750 followers to millions.

It is perhaps ironic, then, that the digital world was in a frenzy about the execution of a man who secluded himself in a technological wasteland. In Osama’s compound, there was no internet connection and, in order to avoid being tracked, no mobile phones were allowed either.

So what exactly did we expect—that Osama would have his own savvy social media consultant? After all, if you have a network of operatives and sympathisers, what better way to issue the call for jihad than in 140 characters? Why go to the trouble of sending VHS video packages to Al-Jazeera when instead you could go directly to Youtube? Perhaps his son, scrolling through Twitter, might have spotted Athar's early reports of trouble brewing and the family would have made a hasty exit.

This is flippant, but with a reason. Twitterers may enjoy beating their drums about having being on the pulse of world events, but the digital silence from bin Laden’s compound is more telling. The al Qaeda leader had no aspirations to join that fray, any more than President Obama would tweet from the Situation Room as he watched the raid through a camera in a Seals helmet.

We now place so much value on having open access to information, via transparent governments, citizen reporters or Wikileaks. Those who offer crumbs of new detail are rewarded with adulation and followers. But the twitterers are the audience, not the action. The real protagonists aren’t pumping out their secrets on Twitter and waiting for the kick of gaining new followers. Osama did not need a large Twitter follower count to assure himself of his position as World’s Number One Terrorist. Nor indeed did Obama want to relay a colourful blow-by-blow account of his troops in action. Information is the modern mantra but the real power still resides in silence.