Will Smith’s live televised slap of presenter Chris Rock during Sunday’s Oscars telecast on ABC millions of tweets within moments of the real-time event as social media users debated the veracity of what they saw, as well as who was right and who was wrong in the incident.
Without weighing in on the sentiment, social media monitoring service ListenFirst estimates Smith generated nearly twice as many tweets referencing him explicitly vs. Rock.
“If nothing else, the Will Smith incident got the social media audience talking about the Oscars again,” notes ListenFirst Director of Content and Communications Marketing Jonathan Cohen, adding: “There were 6,782,662 Tweets that mentioned the Oscars on March 27, 2022. That’s a 164% increase from the 2,571,356 Tweets mentioning the Oscars last year on April 25, 2021.”
Cohen said the best-performing individual tweet related to the Oscars, were primarily related to the real-time face slap.
