A map of how the news of Ferguson spread through Twitter

After a young African-American man was shot in Ferguson, Mo., the news spread through Twitter like wildfire.

Through the #Ferguson hashtag especially, Twitter users spread news updates, asked questions, sought information, and engaged in dialogue around race relations in the U.S., police violence, journalists’ rights, and much more.

Twitter has created an animated map of the U.S. — and the world — of the Twitter activity related to Ferguson, Mo. since the outbreak of the events, using geo-targeted tweets connected to the events into a CartoDB heat map too.

Understandably, much of the activity happened around Missouri, but it’s interesting to see that the news and Twitter activity had noticeable activity in other parts of the world.

Other useful and interesting maps of Twitter data have been made before, such as the earthquake map from Stanford scientists.

(h/t to PBS)