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Gay marriage tweets skyrocket

Twitter saw 1.6 million #gaymarriage tweets yesterday following Obama's support for gay marriage, peaking at more than 7,000 tweets per minute.

Martin LaMonica Former Staff writer, CNET News
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer covering green tech and cutting-edge technologies. He joined CNET in 2002 to cover enterprise IT and Web development and was previously executive editor of IT publication InfoWorld.
Martin LaMonica
Twitter

In case there was any doubt yesterday was a historic day, Twitter stats now confirm it.

The Twitter Government, @gov, today published the above chart which shows the dramatic increase in tweets yesterday hours after President Obama said he supports gay marriage.

There were 1.6 million #gaymarriage tweets. The pace peaked at 7,347 tweets per minute yesterday afternoon eastern time, just minutes after the @Barack Obama account tweeted his support for gay marriage.

The total doubled the previous record set in June last year when New York State's gay marriage law passed.

The data also shows that the number of gay marriage-related Tweets has steadily risen since Obama took office, but as a percentage of total Twitter traffic, it's been very stable for two years except for a few spikes.