A few weeks after Trump’s first tweet, superstar entertainer Michael Jackson died. His passing convulsed the internet in grief. Pop music’s irreplaceable loss, however, proved Twitter’s gain. Millions of people turned to the social network to mourn, reflect, and speculate. The platform’s traffic surged to a record 100,000 tweets per hour before its servers crashed. People were using social media for something new, to experience the news together online.
