On Twitter, men, women, red and blue states heard different Obama speech

Like much in the news, President Obama's State of the Union address was two events in one: The speech and the Twitter reaction to it.

What Twitter showed the world Tuesday was that men and women - and people of different politics - may have heard completely different speeches.

According to Twitter, from the president's entrance at 9:10 p.m. to the conclusion of the Republican and tea party responses at 10:44, 1.36 million State of the Union-themed tweets went out, almost double the number (766,681) from the 2012 speech.

"We were expecting more tweets, but not double," said Steve Minton, president of InferLink Corp. of El Segundo, Calif., a social-media analysis company. "It shows that more people are using Twitter, and . . . with a high-profile event . . . reacting and sharing with Twitter's going to be part of it."

Once Obama began, tweeting reached 15,000 tweets per minute (over last year's 10,000 t.p.m.). His remarks on the middle class and on gun control provoked spikes of about 24,000 t.p.m. (Last year's speech never hit 15,000.)

InferLink analyzed Twitter reaction according to gender (self-identification and linguistic analysis) and red state/blue state.

Women reacted to moments of contact, appreciation, and concern, as when Obama acknowledged his wife, Michelle, or former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a survivor of gun violence, or 102-year-old Floridian Desiline Victor, who waited in line for hours to vote last November.

Women reacted when Obama called for universal preschool (66 percent of tweets were from women vs. 34 percent from men), praised the Violence Against Women Act (67 percent to 33 percent), and said women in the armed forces have "proven under fire that they are ready for combat."

General-interest tweets soared to 23,700 per minute during Obama's "they deserve a vote" peroration on guns. But when he said, "The families of Aurora deserve a vote," referencing the movie-theater shooting last summer, women's tweets surged (71 percent vs. 29 percent).

Things military roused men. Seven in 10 tweets reacting to "After a decade of effort, our brave men and women in uniform are coming home" were male. Men also seemed to like fightin' words: When Obama chided obstructionists in Congress ("The greatest nation on Earth cannot keep conducting its business by drifting from one manufactured crisis to the next"), male tweets outdid female by 64 percent to 36 percent.

Red-staters got tweeting at "our government shouldn't make promises we cannot keep - but we must keep the promises we've already made," and Obama's claim that his initiatives would not add "a single dime" to the deficit.

Blue-staters perked up at middle-class talk, the "manufactured crisis" line, and the lament over "more than a thousand birthdays" stolen since the shootings at Newtown.

What drew the most activity was Obama's declaration that "we need to build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class for all who are willing to climb them," which appealed to all genders, politics, and regions, at 24,000 t.p.m.

"What you're seeing," said Minton, "is that people react not just to the sentence but also to the event, everything surrounding it." The middle class is popular, but there's plenty of controversy over how to help it.

During the Republican response from U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a snarkfest erupted when his innocent but awkward reach for a sip of water spurred 9,200 tweets (his best showing), and was mercilessly turned into the meme of the moment, with irreverent hashtags such as #WaterBoring and #ZeroDarkThirsty.

With good humor, Rubio posted, on Twitter, a picture of his water bottle.