In the whirlwind of the daily news cycle, stories come and go abruptly, moving faster than ever before. But in what may appear a clutter of events are those gripping stories that kept us talking, namely on Twitter.

Echelon Insights, a Republican digital and advertising strategy firm, analyzed more than 184 million tweets across 80 different news events, giving insight into the biggest stories of the year. The infographic below tells the story of 2014 on one of the biggest social media platforms.

“When news breaks, and it broke quite a bit this year, Twitter and other social media is increasingly the place we check first,” Echelon Insights writes. “It’s where we debate, hash out, and explore every angle.”

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