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Video: Facebook marks tragic year for France

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Video: Facebook marks tragic year for France
Tributes left at the Bataclan concert hall. Photo: Franck Fife/AFP

The terrorist attacks on Paris in January and November were two of the most-discussed events on social media this year - not just in France, but worldwide, according to fresh figures from Facebook.

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Thirty million French Facebook users commented on the November 13th attacks, Europe1 reported, making it the year's most-discussed topic in France. Social media was used both to find out information about missing friends and relatives and to pay tribute to the victims.

January's attacks on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Paris supermarket were the second most-commented subject in the country, followed by Syria’s Civil War and the refugee crisis.

On Twitter, #CharlieHebdo and #JeSuisCharlie were France's most popular hashtags, and the most-retweeted comment was president François Hollande's reaction to the November attacks, below.

In the face of terror, there is one nation which knows how to defend itself, mobilize its forces and, once again, will defeat the terrorists.

Sport and culture occupied much of the rest of Facebook's top ten list. Football proved popular with social media users, with both the French national team and Paris Saint-Germain appearing in the list, while rapper Maître Gims and American TV series Game of Thrones also got people talking. 

The death of sailor Florence Arthaud in a helicopter accident was the final topic to appear in the top ten.

Politics seemed to interest social media users less this year, with president François Hollande disappearing from the top ten, having occupied the second place in 2014, although Minister for Economics Emmanuel Macron took the eighth spot in the list.

On a global scale, the attacks in Paris ranked highly among the most-discussed events.

The map below shows the location of more than 6.6 million geotagged tweets containing the phrase ‘#JeSuisCharlie’, demonstrating that the impact of the attacks reverberated far beyond France.


The November 13th attacks were Facebook’s second most-talked about topic worldwide, following the US presidential elections, while the Charlie Hebdo attacks were eighth. This data comes from Facebook’s Year in Review list, published on Wednesday, which measures how frequently topics were mentioned on the social networking site.

Take a look at this video for a snapshot of the year as remembered on Facebook:


 

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