The immediate former US President Barack Obama has broken the Twitter record with the most ‘Liked” Tweet in the history of Twitter. While he does have one of the most followed Twitter handle, @BarackObama with some 93.3 million followers, breaking a record on Twitter is no mean feat.
Obama made the following tweet on August 12, following a national white supremacist and neo-Nazi rally, which left one person dead. 32-years-old Heather Heyer was ran over by a car deliberately smashed into a crowd of anti-hate protesters.
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion…” pic.twitter.com/InZ58zkoAm
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 13, 2017
At the time of writing this post, Obama’s tweet had garnered 3.3 million ‘Likes.’ According to Twitter, the tweet above is the most like Tweet in the history of the social media. The previous record holder, as the most Liked tweet, is by the American pop singer, Ariana Grande, which she made in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in her live concert at Manchester, UK. That tweet got some 2.7 million Likes.
The third most Liked tweet after Obama’s and Grande’s is by Ellen DeGeneres, which she made at the Oscars 2014 Academy Awards. That tweet got 2.4 million likes.
Obama’s Tweet that broke the Twitter record was a quote from Nelson Mandela. A pretty famous quote that was a perfect address to the hatred and stereotype that ran wild at the neo-Nazi and white supremacist rally. Mandela said those words at a time when South Africa was facing its darkest hour thanks to the apartheid system established by the predominantly white government.
The same Tweet by Obama also becomes the fourth most retweeted Tweet ever, with 1.3 million retweets as at the time of writing this post.
The No.1 most retweeted Tweet goes to a Nevada teen who got 18 million retweets for a free one-year supply of chicken nuggets from Wendy’s. The Tweet got 3.7 million retweets.
The No.2 position for most retweeted Tweet goes to DeGeneres selfie with 3.4 million retweets.
3 goes to a 2011 Tweet by One Direction’s Louis Tomlison at Harry Styles, which got 2.57 million retweets.
It, later on, emerged that two more people lost their lives on that day; Virginia State Police troopers – Lt. H Jay Cullen and Trooper-Pilot Berke M M Bates. They two died following a helicopter crash that left dozens more injured.