The central channel for America's political conversation is likely to be all but unusable on Tuesday . A strange bookend to the Twitter Election .
Around 9:00 p.m. EST, on the evening of October 3, the mob of reporters and politicos gathered in Denver for the first presidential debate looked up, with alarm, from their laptops.
Just a few minutes had passed and the candidates had begun answering questions in earnest. Pundits and politics writers were racing to set an early narrative; reporters were live-tweeting the candidates' every utterance. Seemingly everybody else, able or not, made jokes.
In an instant, the sheer noise on Twitter had overwhelmed the signal. The stream flowed by too fast to read, much less retweet. And the service that has defined an election cycle became effectively useless.
I watched reporters around me at the University of Denver go into a sort of write-only Twitter mode, feeding the roar but covering their ears — tweets flew by on their screens too quickly for any human to read. Andrew Kaczynski, a politics reporter at BuzzFeed, told me his TweetDeck actually crashed during the deluge. It was a truly odd sensation:
The bar was too crowded and the music was too loud. Everybody was shouting and nobody was being heard.
This was, in a quantifiable way, a unique event. After the debate, Twitter announced it had been "the most tweeted-about event in U.S. politics," resulting in over ten million tweets over its duration (and millions more in the immediate aftermath). Looking at the data, you can see where those of us who follow a lot of politically inclined people went into info-shock:
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