Interactive SOTU Transcript: How Twitter Responded During Every Moment of Last Night’s Speech

Spoiler: Obama’s “Mad Men” reference was the most-tweeted moment.

The folks over at Twitter have culled their massive data set of user reactions to the State of the Union and put together this nifty visualization of last night’s speech. On top, you’ll see a timeline of the speech with the volume of tweets at any particular moment reflected by the width of the color bar. The big spike in the middle is for Twitter users’ apparent enthusiasm for the President’s Mad Men reference. The timeline is divided into nine different subject areas (health care, budget, jobs, etc.), each of which pull from a set of keywords germane to that issue. You can also take a deeper dive by scrolling down the speech text to see which moments of the speech resonated with which parts of the country in the map to the right. In other words, see how Idaho zigged when the rest of the country zagged! And don’t fret, once you’re through playing here we’ve got some old-fashioned punditry from Kevin Drum and David Corn to soothe your Twitter-addled brain.

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Owned by no one—except you.

We just keep seeing it happen: Newsrooms owned by billionaires and corporations are spinning their own narratives, overwriting the truth, following only stories that keep them in the pocket of those with even more power.

Not here. We’re not owned by anyone. We’re not part of any cult that demands our allegiance to a bottom line. We’ve spoken up and spoken out while other newsrooms changed their stories—or cut them altogether—to keep the C suite happy.

Our mission is to find the truth and amplify it. That’s why we’re independent, nonprofit, and, crucially, funded by readers. The investigations on our website will always be free to read, watch, and listen to, but our newsroom is powered by readers who pitch in what they can so we can keep asking the hard questions.

Can you chip in today?

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