• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 28, 2022

Will Smith's live televised slap of presenter Chris Rock during Sunday's Oscars telecast on ABC millions of tweets within moments of the real-time event as social media users debated the veracity of what they saw, as well as who was right and who was wrong in the incident.

Without weighing in on the sentiment, social media monitoring service ListenFirst estimates Smith generated nearly twice as many tweets referencing him explicitly vs. Rock.

"If nothing else, the Will Smith incident got the social media audience talking about the Oscars again," notes ListenFirst Director of Content and Communications Marketing Jonathan Cohen, adding: "There were 6,782,662 Tweets that mentioned the Oscars on March 27, 2022. That's a 164% increase from the 2,571,356 Tweets mentioning the Oscars last year on April 25, 2021."

Cohen said the best-performing individual tweet related to the Oscars, were primarily related to the real-time face slap.

"YouTube personality Mark Phillips put up a quick sketch reacting to the slap, which got 370,734 engagements on Twitter." Cohen says, adding: "Meanwhile a picture claiming to show the reactions of all the celebrities in the audience reacting to the slap got 342,782 engagements. Additionally, an image of Zendaya captioned to imply that she's texting Tom Holland about the slap got 298,497 engagements on Twitter."