There’s no question about it: Twitter is having an enormous effect on the Olympic games. As social media trends grow, Twitter is generating an unprecedented level of interest in the competition and with that comes a large amount of controversy.
Talk of the London 2012 Olympic Games was expected to take over Twitter, and its community of 140 million active users worldwide didn’t disappoint. During the opening ceremony, Twitter saw more tweets in a single day than it saw during the whole duration of the Beijing 2008 Olympics. This shows how the social networking site has grown and become a huge power in modern society. In 2008, the average number of tweets stood at around 300,000 per day. That number has grown dramatically ever since, and on Friday 9.66 million mentions of the opening ceremony made on Twitter between 8.00 p.m. U.K. time through to the end of the delayed U.S. broadcast, which started more than three hours later.