Millions of Mourners Take to Social Media to Honor Nelson Mandela

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By Kurt Wagner2013-12-06 22:14:23 UTC

Former South African President Nelson Mandela died on Thursday, leaving behind a heartbroken global community and a legacy that will far outlive any of his mourners.

Millions of people took to social media to honor the great political leader. On Twitter, users generated 7.2 million tweets about his death, including a peak of 95,000 tweets per minute, according to a Twitter spokesperson.

See also: World Leaders Honor Nelson Mandela

That total surpasses some busy Twitter moments from this year, but doesn't set any Twitter records. For comparison, the Super Bowl in February between the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens generated more than 24 million tweets, including more than 231,000 per minute during the game's power outage.

On Facebook Thursday, the traffic was even higher. A total of 39 million people generated more than 80 million interactions related to Mandela's death. As to be expected, South Africa was the second most active country in terms of posts about its former president, following only the United States.

Twitter used tweets about Mandela's death to generate the following graphic, made up of the texts of those tweets.

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Image: Twitter

Topics: Facebook, miley cyrus, Nelson Mandela, Social Media, Twitter, World