Kanye West: World tweets map

Kanye West’s sometimes-dormant, sometimes-frantic Twitter presence has surged in 2016. The musician and designer has tweeted about topics ranging from his beefs with Wiz Khalifa and Deadmau5 to the ways he thinks the music industry can improve. West took to Twitter again on Tuesday night to muse about his creative process — and the social media service has now provided a fascinating visualization of how the world responds to his well-documented tweetstorms.

Twitter tracked tweets mentioning West’s name or handle (@KanyeWest) over a 12-hour period — 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. ET — that contained the tweetstorm. Then the service plotted the data as glowing yellow dots on a global map. The results are impressive: West’s name dominated conversations from North America to Europe to regions of Australia, Africa, Asia, and South America.

West also achieved the milestone of 20 million followers this week, so Twitter provided statistics about his general use of the service. In April 2013, he had about 7 million followers — just months after he deleted all his tweets in late 2012 — and he hadn’t improved his following (relatively speaking) much by the beginning of 2015. But since January of last year, West has more than doubled his follower count from less than 10 million to the current figure.

Twitter also shared some of West’s most retweeted tweets — and they provide a succinct summary of the celebrity. With 391,279 retweets, September 2015’s “Please: Do everything you possibly can in one lifetime.” tops the list and captures West’s creative and motivational drive. At second and third, with 269,407 and 241,921 retweets respectively, “not smiling makes me smile” and “I’m not even gon lie to you. I love me so much right now.” get play to his egotistical reputation. And the fourth and fifth slots on the list are held by tweets about his work: Announcing his latest album’s release date (“Swish February 11 16”) and bragging about how great it is (“This is not the album of the year. This is album of the life.”).