1504 tweets per minute during Labor spill The Labor leadership spill sent twitter users into a frenzy, with 1504 tweets per minute. THE political twittersphere went berserk during Thursday's Labor leadership spill with a seven-fold spike in the volume of tweets about federal politics. Between 11am and 11pm (AEDT) on Thursday the hashtags #spill, #Auspol, #qt, and the names and handles of key figures in federal politics generated more than 247,000 tweets, says Thrive PR, a firm that monitors and researches Twitter postings. "The data comes from Twitter's internal analytics, and measures conversation around core terms related to the spill," a Thrive spokeswoman said. Over the same 12-hour period on Wednesday, when rumours of a spill were rife but not yet confirmed, the same hashtags and users only posted about 35,000 tweets. According to the figures, at 4.22pm on Thursday there were 1504 tweets per minute to the hashtags and users linked to the spill, sparked by Kevin Rudd's announcement he would not challenge for leadership of Labor. The largest Twitter spike on record followed the first US presidential debate, hitting a peak of 327,452 tweets per minute.