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Reaction To Ferguson Decision Generates 3.5 Million Tweets

This article is more than 9 years old.

There were more than 3.5 million tweets mentioning Ferguson last night following the announcement of a grand jury’s decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson of fatally shooting unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in August.

Between 9 and 11:15 p.m. EST, more than 26,000 tweets were sent per minute according to Twitter. At its peak, more than 52,000 tweets were sent in one minute, measured at 9:29 p.m. – just three minutes before the announcement by St. Louis prosecuting attorney Bob McCulloch.

By 10 p.m., the rate of tweets had fallen under 30,000 per minute, but picked up again 15 minutes later as Twitter reacted to a written statement released by the shooting victim’s family.

Compared to a recent event, President Obama’s immigration speech last Thursday generated 385,000 tweets over a two-hour window with a peak rate of a little under 10,000 tweets per minute. But until Twitter releases data on Ferguson’s tweet per second statistic, we won’t know how last night compares to Twitter’s overall record, which is measured in tweets per second.

The current record of 143,199 tweets per second was set in Japan on Aug. 3, 2013 during the airing of the animated film, “Castle in the Sky,” shattering the previous record of 33,388, which was also set in Japan to begin 2013.

Follow Frank Bi on Twitter at @FrankieBi