Trump chatter breaking all records on Facebook
Every week this month, Donald Trump has shattered his previous records for generating Facebook conversation, and last week users generated more than 307 million likes, comments, shares and posts about him. The prior week, Trump had 253 million Facebook interactions, and the week before that, he had 220 million, according to weekly data provided by Facebook.
By comparison, Hillary Clinton also hit her all-time high last week with 206 million interactions on Facebook. It was the first time she broke 200 million interactions.
USA TODAY tracks these interactions each week in our 2016 USA TODAY/Facebook Candidate Barometer.
The interactions about Trump were generated by 38.3 million unique Facebook users last week, while Clinton's interactions were generated by 29.5 million users — meaning, if you do the math, that the average Trump commenter is posting/linking/sharing/commenting about him eight times a week, while the average Hillary commenter is interacting just over seven times.
Since January, no other candidate but Trump has ever registered more than seven interactions per user per week, indicating an extraordinarily high level of intensity in the conversation about him.
The volume of chatter about Trump and Clinton on Facebook also reflects the challenges third-party candidates face trying to break into the conversation. Libertarian Gary Johnson peaked with 12.6 million interactions the last week of September. Green Party candidate Jill Stein has never generated more than 5.9 million interactions, and that was in July.
Usual cautionary note: This data measures only volume of conversation, not sentiment, so there is no way to know how many of these comments are negative.