Denver Debate Most Tweeted U.S. Political Event Ever

At 9:34 pm ET, Mitt Romney declared he wanted to kill Big Bird.

The blowback, as is always the case in 2012, was instant. Romney’s license to pluck generated 17,000 tweets per minute for “Big Bird,” another 10,000 for “PBS,” and it inspired three new Twitter accounts: @FiredBigBird racked up 24,000 followers, @BigBirdRomney drew 8,400 followers, and @SadBigBird didn’t get much traction, with fewer than 300 new followers.

Twitter/@MattOrtega

With 10.3 million tweets, Wednesday night’s debate was the most discussed event in American political history on Twitter, easily beating the numbers from the Democratic National Convention (9.5M tweets over the whole week) and Republican National Convention (4 million tweets over the whole week).

“The most-tweeted moment came shortly before 10 p.m. EDT, with 158,690 Tweets being sent in a single minute following moderator Jim Lehrer’s ‘Let’s not’ reply to Governor Romney,” according to Twitter’s Government & Politics team. “This peak was more than three times the roughly 52,000 Tweets per minute political record observed at the end of President Obama’s convention speech.” Grasp that: Nearly 160,000 tweets in ONE minute.

Here’s a handy chart, via Twitter, click to embiggen:

For analysis of what this all means, tune into “Politics Powered By Twitter” on SiriusXM’s POTUS 124 at 6 pm ET. We do it every day.

China’s version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, lit up as well, Quartz reported:

The term “debate” had over 9 million mentions, and most of the recent posts referred to the US presidential debate. A search for “Obama,” in Chinese, 奥巴马, came up with over 19 million hits. A search for “Romney,” 罗姆尼, came up with about 672,000 after the debate had finished.

While Chinese netizens seem to be following the election avidly, many were cynical about it and critical of both candidates. Some were impressed by Obama but said he seemed to have lost his edge since his election in 2008. A user named zongfeng wrote, “When Obama answered questions he had prepared, he was extremely smooth and unconstrained but when answering ones he wasn’t ready he very obviously lost points.” Another by the name Xisi said, “Obama’s debating is as bad as the New York Jets’ offense.”

What an awesome Jets reference. Sounds like The Onion.