Twitter users in Singapore sent out a grand total of 170,000 tweets over the past two weeks as election fever took over the Southeast Asian city-state.
The bulk of the online chatter occurred on Polling Day, with netizens churning out 110,000 election-related conversations on Twitter last Friday and the wee hours of Saturday morning. Tweets on the social media platform peaked at 330 tweets per minute at 12.29am local time on Saturday, alongside the announcements of final election results.
Twitter released the statistics on Saturday after tabulating the online chatter in Singapore from September 1-11. September 1 was Nomination Day, which marked the official start of the election campaign, and saw a flurry of 15,000 tweets being sent.
This year's general elections had been dubbed Singapore's most hotly-contested poll since independence 50 years ago, with the opposition parties mounting their biggest challenge against ruling People's Action Party (PAP) by contesting all 89 parliamentary seats for the first time.
However, the PAP stomped to a strong victory, taking 83 seats in the parliament while increasing its share of the vote to nearly 70 percent. That marked a drastic improvement from the 60.1 percent vote the ruling party had garnered in the 2011 elections.
"This election results show that Singaporeans understand what is at stake, that we can prosper only if we stay united and that we need to get the best team possible, assembled, in order to serve Singapore," Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong – son of Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew – told supporters at a post-elections briefing.
The team helmed by the Prime Minister in the Ang Mo Kio Group Representation Constituency (GRC) was one of the best-performing GRCs won by the PAP in 2015, with 78.6 percent of votes. Hence, it is of little surprise that the leader's thank-you post to his supporters in the electoral division made it as one of the top tweets of the night.
Other most shared tweets for the day include:
When people complain about cpf, coe, gst, etc but still vote for PAP. #GE2015
Who were all these people attending opposition rallies??? Ghosts?????? #GE2015
Despite the barrage of tweets on September 11, the most-tweeted event remains the National Day Parade on August 9, which saw over 230,000 tweets sent out in a day. That figure smashed the city-state's 100,000-tweet record held by British boy band One Direction when the former quintet held a concert in Singapore earlier in March.