Who won the presidential debate on Twitter: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton… or Chance the Rapper?

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The early polls – the more reliable ones, at least – suggest Hillary Clinton won Monday’s night’s first presidential debate. But which candidate won over Twitter? According to the social media monitoring tool Brandwatch, neither of them. In fact, the night’s big Twitter winner wasn’t a presidential candidate, but a hip hop star.

The firm analysed all the online conversations taking place during the 90 minutes of the debate, and found that Ms Clinton and Donald Trump both ended the evening with more negative than positive Twitter mentions.

In tweets about the Democrat, the sentiment was 55.7 per cent negative, while mentions of Mr Trump were 65.4 per cent negative. However, Brandwatch warned in a statement, “Examining candidate sentiment from the debate is becoming increasingly difficult… in the primary stage people had several candidates to focus on and tweet about. Now there are [just] two, and many mentions contain both candidates.”

The biggest “conversation peak” for either candidate all night, meanwhile, came at 9.51pm EST, shortly after Mr Trump began touting himself as the “law and order” candidate. That’s when Chance the Rapper stepped in with a tweet that helped the Republican to earn more than 30,000 social media mentions in just one minute. Chance’s tweet – undoubtedly negative in sentiment – has since been retweeted more than 50,000 times - and liked more than 100,000 times.

During the debate, Mr Trump received a total of 1.8 million Twitter mentions, while Clinton collected a mere 1.2 million mentions. While Ms Clinton led in mentions at the very start of the debate, the property mogul soon overtook her.

Mr Trump also created a conversation peak of 27,000 mentions in a minute with his claim that he had a better temperament than Ms Clinton. The former Secretary of State’s biggest Twitter moment of the night came at 10.03pm, when she acknowledged that she had prepared for the debate, adding: “You know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be President.”

Aside from Ms Clinton, Mr Trump and Chance the Rapper, the Twitter handles with the most debate-related mentions included moderator Lester Holt of NBC, Fox News and the fact-checking site Politifact.