Twitter sees record election-related activity with 396 million tweets

The jury may be divided on how much of a role Twitter played in the just concluded general elections, but if the numbers are any indication, the medium was certainly used extensively for messaging around the democratic exercise.

According to Twitter, as many as 396 million tweets were made around the Lok Sabha elections between 1 January and 23 May, 2019.

On Thursday, the counting day, 3.2 million tweets were made, with one third of the tweets recorded between 3 and 4 pm, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi also tweeted.

The microblogging platform saw a 600 per cent rise in conversations over the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The #LokSabhaElections2019 emoji featured hashtags in not just English and Hindi, but Tamil and Gujarati also.