Twitter general election engagement doubles since 2017

13 December 2019, 22:32

Twitter has called the surge in political tweets a "significant 106% increase" in conversation since the last general election in 2017.

Since the dissolution of Parliament in November this year, 18.8 million election tweets have been sent. Figures released by Twitter suggest that political engagement more than doubled on the social media platform since the 2017 election.

Throughout polling day, #YouthQuake, #BeAVoter, and #IVoted rose in popularity on the social media platform, with celebrities including Stormzy and Harry Styles sending political tweets.

The hashtags #ukelection and #GE2019 were widely used throughout Friday morning to tweet constituency results and reaction.

The most-tweeted emojis on election day were the rose symbol to signify the Labour Party, the Union Jack flag, and the crying-with-laughter face.

Prior to the election, many celebrities were using Twitter as a platform to encourage social media users to register to vote.

A spokeswoman for Twitter said: "With a tweets-per-minute spike of 10,400 greeting the exit poll at 10.05pm, and 1.6m unique authors tweeting, the trends on the night soon proved to be the personalities, human stories and fast-changing facts which are at the core of Twitter.

"Almost every trending term from 10pm until 7am was either the name of a politician involved in a development, or a constituency where a surprising result was happening."

Despite polls giving the Conservatives a majority, figures show that Jeremy Corbyn dominated Twitter conversation by 70% on polling day, compared with 26% for Boris Johnson.

With all 650 results declared on Friday, the Conservatives had 365 seats, while Labour were on 203, a net loss of 42.