Brazil elections most talked about in Facebook history

Brazil's elections Sunday inspired 346 million comments, conversations and other exchanges on Facebook, going on record as the most talked about in the social network's history.

The former record-holder was India, where elections this April and May earned 227 million exchanges, said Facebook's director of institutional relations in Brazil, Bruno Magrani.

"From the official start of the electoral campaign on June 5 to today (Monday), we have 346 million exchanges. It's an impressive number," he said.

He told AFP he expected even more chatter around the run-off race between leftist incumbent Dilma Rousseff and Social Democrat Aecio Neves on October 26.

Facebook "exchanges" refer to all photos and content shared, comments, conversations and "likes."

With 200 million residents and half of its population connected to the Internet, Brazil ranks third in the world in Facebook users (89 million per month, according to the social network) and second in Twitter users, after the United States.

The debates in the first round of elections alone generated 20 million exchanges amongst Brazilians.

On Twitter, 2.6 million messages were tweeted on voting day.

Magrani said election-related chatter was growing worldwide as use of social networks explodes.

"At Facebook, we even have a global team that works specifically to follow political campaigns throughout the world," he said.

© 2014 AFP