Why Was Twitter So Obsessed With #Earthquake East? [STATS]

The earthquake that hit the East Coast just before 2pm ET on August 23 might have caused little damage, but it kicked up quite the storm on Twitter.

Within one minute of the earthquake hitting Virginia, Twitter saw 40,000 earthquake-related tweets, and at their peak earthquake tweets reached 5,000 tweets-per-second – more than Osama bin Laden’s death and on par with the earthquake in Japan.

So with all of the mind-boggling stats coming out of this relatively harmless geological event, one question remains: why were Twitter users so obsessed with this particular earthquake?

This was not a big tragedy, a frightening event or a destructive force.

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