Presidential debate also scores on social media

The first presidential debate set a new ratings record, and many of those viewers were also busy on social media.

Monday night’s presidential debate generated 73.8 million total interactions on Facebook, according to the social site, along with 55 million viewers of Facebook Live videos related to the debate.

In all, 18.6 million users accounted for some sort of debate-related interaction on Facebook.

As a comparison, the first Republican primary debate in August of last year generated 20 million interactions from 7.4 million Facebook users.

Most of the social buzz surrounded Donald Trump. The Republican candidate generated 79 percent of the interactions on Facebook, versus just 21 percent for Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s ‘temperament’ tops Twitter

Meanwhile, Twitter hasn’t released specific numbers for the event, only saying it was the most-tweeted-about debate ever. It did say the most-tweeted moment was when Trump said he had a “much better temperament” than Clinton.

“I think my strongest asset, maybe by far, is my temperament,” he said. “I have a winning temperament. I know how to win.”

Also, the most retweeted tweet on Monday night wasn’t from a political pundit or someone watching the debate live. It was a tweet from Trump himself, dated Nov. 6, 2012.

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” the tweet read. Of course, Trump contradicted that sentiment during the debate when he said he’d never called global warming a hoax.

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