When armed attackers stormed the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris this week killing 12 people, there was an immediate outpouring of grief and outrage. Within hours of the attack, the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie ("I am Charlie" in French) began appearing on Twitter.
By Friday, people claimed it had become Twitter's most popular hashtag ever.
It's not.
The hashtag #JeSuisCharlie has generated millions of tweets with Twitter France reporting more than 5 million.
5M Tweets de solidarité avec #JeSuisCharlie publiés dans le monde #Fiertéhttp://t.co/AoL0DuYHOf pic.twitter.com/rv0TxAVDCh— Twitter France (@TwitterFrance) January 9, 2015
For the sake of comparison, the #WorldCupFinal, which was held in July of last year, generated 32.1 million tweets. During last summer's MTV Video Music Awards, the hashtag #vote5sos, generated 78 million tweets.
The activity surrounding #JeSuisCharlie is more comparable to tweets mentioning #Ferguson (3.5 million in less than one day) following the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown case.
There have been over 3.5 million Tweets tonight mentioning the #Ferguson decision http://t.co/RqFRGgqSW7— Twitter Data (@TwitterData) November 25, 2014
And to #IceBucketChallenge, which had 4.2 million tweets.
Though Twitter has yet to comment directly, the company is clearly aware of the rumor. On Friday, Twitter retweeted the time lapse image map showing geo-tagged Tweets sent using the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag.
UPDATED: #JeSuisCharlie spreads around the world on Twitter http://t.co/bKMjDaUkL0 pic.twitter.com/o7d01UZHzZ— Twitter Data (@TwitterData) January 9, 2015
You can see the time lapse animation below.