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30 years later, follow the Falklands War live on Twitter

Celebrate the anniversary of the Twentieth Century's strangest war with this anachronistic Twitter account. 

 

Kris Holt

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Posted on May 28, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 4:34 pm CDT

Before the halcyon days of the Web, people were forced to wait for the nightly news or next morning’s newspaper to find out what happened. Of course, instantaneous reporting is the norm nowadays and Twitter is giving us the chance to relive historical events as they happened.

The Falklands War between Britain and Argentina was the biggest naval battle since World War II, and almost 900 men lost their lives in the battle. The conflict spanned 74 days between April and June 1982, and now, 30 years later, Twitter account @falklands82 is reliving the events as they happened.

The account started tracking the conflict on March 19. That’s the 30th anniversary of the war’s first offensive, when a group of scrap metal merchants, which had been infiltrated by Argentine marines, raised that country’s flag on South Georgia island. The account has since posted more than 600 tweets tracking the war.

It’s not the first account to attempt live tweeting historical events. Earlier this year, @TitanicRealTime posted updates about the Titanic, which sank a century before. Since last August, @RealTimeWWII has been tweeting the events of World War II as they took place 71 years previously.

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*First Published: May 28, 2012, 2:09 pm CDT