Twitter and the 2012 election

The world's major political event of the year, the election of the U.S. president, has left a deep, perhaps even historic mark on the World Wide Web. First, it has become a real triumph for Twitter. In the numerous discussions that followed the victory of Barack Obama on the election, the role of social media in the campaign was stressed. According to some experts, Obama owed his presidency to the "army" of his followers.

This campaign has been called "the greatest event in the history of Twitter,". First, Twitter has never "collapsed" during all time of the vote. Microblog service during the day took up to 400,000 tweets per minute. However, he remained operational. Twitter's creative director, Doug Bowman, wrote about it: "Rest in peace, Fail Whale". This refers to the picture of a smiling whale, whom birds try vainly to take to the skies - Twitter logos. Users of twitter seen such an image, if it was not available.

Now, the management of the company hinted that this problem is in the past. During voting day elections gained more than 20 million tweets, and that is not counting retweets. Even journalists kept on the "Twitter" own votes statistic. Many voters wrote for whom they gave voice: according the latest statistics, such peoples were more than 20 percent of the total. Well, the winning message of Barack Obama "Four more years" and a photo of the president with the first lady was the most popular tweet of all time. This message was retweeted  nearly by 800,000 users.

Meanwhile, if Twitter has become a refuge of those who are interested in politics, Google, by contrast, at the last moment attracted the "darkest" category of citizens. In the final days before the vote, thousands of Americans opened the search engine to ask one question: "Who is running for the U.S. presidency?". And there was a real explosion of interest directly on the day before voting. This is surprising, but the statistics are relentless. Perhaps that was the reason why Romney has lost. His voters did not know that they need to vote for him.