Half a million tweets in 12 hours around leadership #spill

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Social media media platform Twitter has said there were more than 500,000 spill-related tweets last night in the 12 hours around the Rudd Gillard leadership battle.

A graphic released by the company shows traffic began to grow at 4.19pm, when Julia Gillard announced the caucus vote, and then building steadily always spiking at major announcements such as during the Kevin Rudd and Bill Shorten press conferences. The largest spike in traffic occurred at 7.54pm when the result of the leadership vote was announced when there were more than 5000 tweets per minute.

The figures correlate with data analysed by the Queensland University of Technology’s Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation’s Axel Bruns who said the traffic was similar to what has been seen in previous political leadership spills.