Social media explodes during Oscars; TV viewership doesn’t

By David Bauder, The Associated Press

Will Smith’s violent slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars appeared to have a negligible impact on the show’s television audience. But the world of social media is a much different story.

ABC said there were some 22.7 million social media interactions during Sunday’s ceremony — the most ever for an Oscars telecast and more than double the 9.5 million recorded from last year’s show.

What do you suppose everyone was tweeting or posting about?

The network says Oscar videos notched 16 million views on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, also a record for the show. ABC does not have any details about what video clips were most popular, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

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The telecast as a whole drew 16.6 million viewers, up 58% from the 2021 show that was dramatically scaled back due to the pandemic, the Nielsen company said. Yet this year’s show was down 30% from the more typical 2020 broadcast, which had been the second-smallest audience.

Nielsen measures viewership in 15-minute increments, and the 17.3 million viewers during the quarter-hour when Smith’s attack took place was virtually identical to the quarter-hour that followed.

Then the audience dipped to 16.8 million before rising to 17.4 million during the period Smith won his best actor award, Nielsen said.

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