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Twitter's discovered history

On the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination last November, several news and media org­­anizations (including NPR, CBS News, and History) commemorated the event by tweeting the tragedy as if it were unfolding in real time. Tweeting past events as if they were live, referred to as “historical tweeting,” is a growing trend, one that combines historical sources and old news alerts with the immediacy of Twitter to recreate the past without reenactors and props. In the case of the JFK assassination anniversary, news outlets eerily began live-tweeting the day’s events with Kennedy’s landing in Dallas, and somberly concluded with Walter Cronkite’s announcement of the president’s death at 2:35 p.m.

While historical tweeting gains a ­temporary audience, Twitter accounts that distribute historical pictures, called “history pics accounts,” are amassing staggering numbers of followers. History pics accounts tweet photographs from the past, often with one-line descriptions authored by the account holder (there are 14 such Twitter accounts, by Slate columnist Rebecca Onion’s count). The accounts share very similar content; they often tweet pictures of JFK, concentration camp survivors, Marilyn Monroe, Steve Jobs, and, of course, Abraham Lincoln. 

According to Alexis Madrigal, a writer for the Atlantic who took a close look at the people and metrics behind these accounts, ­@HistoryInPics (which boasts an impressive 1.13 million followers) averages 1,600 retweets and 1,800 favorites for every tweet. For comparison, she points out thatVanity Fair’s Twitter account, with 1.3 million followers, averages only a dozen or so retweets and favorites per tweet. The immediate success and massive following of history-pic accounts have created a significant online media genre amassing more than 5 million followers across more than 14 accounts (although this does not account for unique followers). Historical tweeters have found success as well, although not on the same level as their pic-sharing counterparts. An NPR historical tweeter, @todayin1963, which was one of the primary JFK anniversary live-tweeters, now reaches more than 30,000 unique users a day.
Read entire article at AHA Perspectives