Obama’s Charlottesville tweet sets a record

Barack Obama’s response to the violence in Charlottesville, Va., became the most-liked tweet in Twitter’s history Tuesday night, according to representatives for the social media platform.

The former president’s tweet, sent out Saturday evening, paired a quote from Nelson Mandela’s 1994 autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” with a picture of Obama smiling up at a diverse group of young children.

“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background or his religion ...,” Obama posted.

It broke the record at about 10:07 Tuesday evening, a Twitter spokesperson said, surpassing a tweet from Ariana Grande earlier this year reacting to a terrorist attack at her concert in Manchester, England.

The picture of Obama was taken by the White House photographer at the time, Pete Souza, on June 9, 2011, at a daycare facility in Bethesda, Maryland, near where Obama’s younger daughter, Sasha, had just participated in her fourth-grade closing ceremony.

Obama’s supporters were often grateful for his emotional responses to moments of national tragedy. Those included his tearful speech years after the fact as he recalled the killings of children in Newtown, Connecticut, and his singing of “Amazing Grace” while eulogizing the reverend of a church in Charleston, South Carolina, who was one of nine killed by a white gunman motivated by racist hatred.

His tweet provided a contrast to U.S. President Donald Trump’s equivocal responses to the protests in Charlottesville. The protests developed out of a rally organized by white nationalists and resulted in the death of one counterprotester. Trump, in his early response to the episode, condemned the violence on “many sides.”

Obama’s tweet passed Grande’s on the same day that Trump repeated his criticism of “both sides” in Charlottesville in an impromptu question-andanswer session.