Placing your vote is a ritual that should evoke civic pride, and tens of thousands of Instagram users told the world that they voted in Tuesday’s presidential election.
More than 100,000 Instagram photos were shared with the #IVoted hashtag Tuesday, and upwards of 150,000 photos got the #election2012 tag. More than 3,800 used the #ivotedtoday tag, and more than 2,100 used #ivotedcnn.
As soon as NBC called the election for Obama, there was a large spike in activity, Instagram noted on its blog. The volume of photos uploaded soared to 2.1 times normal levels within a few minutes.
The chart below suggests NBC called it at 8:14 EST, when that actually happened three hours later. (Perhaps Instagram meant to note the times as PST. We’ve reached out for clarification.)
As voters headed to the polls, Instagram was flooded with photos users took while filling out ballots. However, sharing their votes with their Instagram followers may not have been the smartest move, because taking a photo of a ballot is illegal in many states.
The quarter-million photo haul follows on from what might have been the biggest single event in Instagram’s history: Hurricane Sandy. At one point last Monday, Instagramers were sharing 10 photos tagged with #sandy every second, and more than 800,000 photos related to the storm and her effects have been shared in total.
Tuesday was a big night for Twitter too. More than 31 million election-related tweets were sent. Obama set a world record due to the hundreds of thousands of retweets his victory photo got, and set two Guinness World Records on Facebook with the same image.
UPDATE: Facebook provided an updated version of the chart, listing the correct (PST) times.
Photo by @dominikat85/Instagram
