As the tragic events unfolded in Mumbai over the last 40 hours, something truly remarkable happened; an ragtag army of citizen journalists started live-blogging on Twitter. What began as a disjointed and somewhat confusing conversation rapidly evolved into up to the minute reporting from people at the scene. Into the second day of the attack, an aggregator site was slapped together that featured the best of the Twitter feeds, a couple of Flicker galleries, YouTube videos on a time line and a Google map of the hot zone.

It was rumored that the Indian government had asked tweeters to stop posting live updates, or to stop tweeting altogether. I saw a number of tweets to that effect around the 20-hour mark, but have not seen one up there for quite a few hours. For the most part #mumbai did a pretty good job of keeping potentially sensitive information out of the feed.

Local bloggers posting to Flickr showed similar restraint. Notably, Arun Shanbhag kept a 2-hour delay on his photos, likewise Vinu who posted posted some truly amazing Flickr galleries. I am sure that there were others out there, but I didn’t feel the need to browse any further.

An undoubtedly greater threat than anything posted on social media sites was posed by the news networks that showed live video footage of the movements of military personnel, including attacks as they were mounted. For the terrorists, these live video feeds would have provided much more valuable intelligence than a stream of text with the occasional link to a set of photos.

Around the web there have been mixed reviews of the Twitter reporting of the Mumbai terror strikes. Some of the mainstream press was rather critical of the reporting quality, take CNN’s Stephanie Busari quoting blogger Tim Mallon to sum up the experience:

I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets. During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly differing estimates of the numbers killed and injured - ranging up to 1,000.

Busari goes on to give her opinion, which seems to be based on a “quick trawl” of the twits:

What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted. A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media.

I find myself in complete disagreement with Busari, who certainly did not make the effort to investigate the full scope of Twitter reports. In general, I found international media coverage of the terror strike to be woefully inadequate. Mainstream news sites like Reuters did provide some well written summaries of the events, but did not give us anything that had not been previously tweeted, re-tweeted and re-re-tweeted. Over the past two days, social media sites have provided more than an additional source of information, they provided a viable alternative to the mainstream press. Sure it was raw, and there were a few idiots who wanted to make a scene, but at the end of the day a good deal of truth came out.

Check out Vinu’s Flickr photo stream here.
[Image sources: Vinu and Arun Shanbhag]

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