The social networking site Twitter again stole a march on traditional media when it was the first outlet to publish dramatic pictures of the Turkish Airlines crash.
Moments after the plane crashed at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport on Wednesday morning the news was appearing on Twitter, iReport’s International Correspondent Errol Barnett said. “This is a story that broke on Twitter first and continued to unfold from there. Eyewitnesses were posting comments about the shock of seeing the plane ‘dive’ and amazement of passengers walking out of the wreckage,” Barnett said. “It was a dramatic image of a fractured plane posted on Twitter.com that was the first worldwide view of the Turkish Airlines crash. It was snapped by an eyewitness driving on the nearby A-9 highway, just north of the crash site.” iReport: Send your videos, stories Barnett said that when CNN saw the image it moved quickly to confirm with Dutch officials that a crash had happened. “Within minutes we were reporting on the story. We then confirmed with the Twitter user that the image was theirs and took it to air. “This proves that social networking sites can be a real asset in covering breaking news and gathering eyewitness accounts but the web should always be treated with extreme caution,” Barnett said. See where the plane crashed »
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“We make a concerted effort to reach out to people posting on the Internet to verify what they say matches up with official accounts.” Twitter first rose to prominence during the Mumbai terror attacks, when people sent messages to their sites from the hotels under attack.
