Politicians and electorate all of a-twitter as the campaign heats up

Monday, live from Limerick: For the only time during the election campaign, the seven key leaders stepped onto a single stage and in front of a prime time television audience.

However, it was not only the people on the stage of the second leaders’ debate that had a point to make. From living rooms, bedrooms, and pubs across the country, the watching public hurled thousands upon thousands of tweets about the debate into the digital crossfire.

At its peak, Twitter was a gushing deluge: Seven tweets a second; around 420 per minute; almost 70,000 tweets about the debate itself. Monday was no average day on the digital campaign trail. Well over twice as many tweets, 28,000, mentioned a candidate standing in the election as on an average day of the campaign trail so far. The debate was by some distance the single largest digital moment of the campaign so far.