#PrayForBoston: The Massive Twitter Response
https://c3.datawrapper.de/4Eepz/1/#embed
See the link above for the interactive version of this graph
As shown by this graph, nearly 10 million tweets were sent out on the day of the Boston Marathon bombings. #PrayForBoston appeared in 3,566,830 of the tweets, and we don’t really see #BostonStrong emerge as a popular hashtag until the 20th, shortly after the suspects were captured.
Statistic Brain reports that on average, there are about 58 million tweets per day on Twitter. Obviously, there were most likely many more than 58 million tweets on April 15, but the fact that 10 million tweets were about the Boston Marathon bombing is already rather impressive. In fact, so much attention was given on Twitter to the events that #PrayForBoston became one of the top Trending Topics of 2013, and that hashtag didn’t even account for half of the tweets about the tragedy.
Huffington Post compiled the top 10 International News Trending Topics of 2013
Furthermore, a website that analyzes the national mood based on tweets (www.hedonometer.org), revealed that April 15, 2013, the day of the bombings, was the saddest day on Twitter in the past 5 years. Does this mean that Americans considered the Boston Marathon bombings to be more tragic than the Newtown shooting, or other tragedies that have occurred since 2006? Not necessarily. Chris Danforth, who developed the site, noted that the tragedy occurred on a Monday- a day of the week where the general populace seems to be more negative overall. On the flip side, the Newtown shooting occurred on a Friday- a day that tends to have more positive feelings.
Sources:
2. http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/
3. https://blog.twitter.com/2013/the-boston-bombing-how-journalists-used-twitter-to-tell-the-story
4. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/12/12/twitter-top-trending-topics-2013_n_4430495.html
5. http://www.livescience.com/29160-saddest-day-twitter-happiness.html