President Obama on Tuesday gave his sixth State of the Union address, delivering it, for the first time, to a Republican-controlled joint session of Congress. With an estimated 30 million people watching, Obama laid out a far-reaching vision for his final two years in office, emphasizing economic opportunities for middle and lower-income Americans. Among other appeals, he called on Congress to impose new taxes and fees on the highest income earners, increase tax credits for education and childcare and make community college free for most students.
As expected, the Twittersphere was vibrant throughout the speech, with millions of viewers tweeting their reactions to various moments. The visualization below, created by Twitter's own Nicolas Belmonte and Simon Rogers shows the volume of real-time tweets nationwide (using the hashtag "#sotu") made in reaction to each and every paragraph Obama read. It also shows which parts of the country certain topics got the most buzz . Overall, education, jobs, economy and foreign policy were the topics in the Obama's address that seemed to garner the greatest amount of attention among users of the social network.
But first take a look at Rogers' time-lapse of SOTU related Twitter activity during the address (zoom out to see other countries).