Kanye West’s Speech Was Most Tweeted About Moment from 2015 VMAs

The advent and subsequent rise of social media has changed the way we consume media and celebrity culture in every conceivable way — and that includes the MTV Video Music Awards.

According to Deadline, the 2015 VMAs were the most tweeted non-sports event since Nielsen first began tracking television-related Twitter activity back in October 2011. In the U.S. alone, 2.2 million people sent out over 21.4 million tweets about the VMAs. This news comes just hours after a report from Billboard claimed that this year's significant decrease in viewership could potentially hasten the awards show's cancellation.

Digiday reports that most tweets about the broadcast leaned more positive than negative, though most of the negative tweets occurred during Kanye West’s nearly 13-minute-long acceptance speech for the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award. His speech garnered a total of 551,466 tweets.

Miley Cyrus' nip-slip earned a significantly smaller amount of tweets, weighing in at 147,285, while Justin Bieber’s emotional onstage release (he wept at the end of his comeback performance) garnered 80,136 tweets.

Taylor Swift, meanwhile, earned a mere 27,162 tweets for introducing Kanye. And somehow, Nicki Minaj’s direct and unscripted confrontation with Miley Cyrus earned only 27,441 tweets, which is a shame because that moment was one of the night's best.

MTV’s decision to mock up a special Moonman emoji, which was automatically added to tweets that used the #VMAs hashtag, was a good one, as it seemed to encourage more people to use the official hashtag. 4.19 million tweets included it, which is a major increase over last year’s 1.44 million tweets using the same hashtag.

Did you live-tweet during the VMAs? We did!

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