Online coverage of this morning’s story of the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar in Galway has spread around the world, predominantly led by social media as people shared the news and engaged in discussion and debate around the social, moral and legal issues around the tragedy.
An article covering the story on the BBC News site has been the most-read on the broadcaster’s website all day, including a feature on the main BBC homepage.
Social-media news monitoring website NewsWhip says over a three hour period, the BBC article has been tweeted almost 1,000 times and Facebooked 8600 times and remains the most-read and most-shared news item on the BBC website today.
The story has also led the front page of Guardian.co.uk, DailyMail.co.uk and Mirror.co.uk as well making the homepages of the US and UK editions of The Huffington Post as well as popular US-based women's interest blog Jezebel.
The reaction on twitter has led to two separate hashtags trending on Twitter on Ireland. Tweets using #savita and #ripsavita have been used in excess of 15,000 times so far today.
The popular international social sharing website Reddit has featured at least two references to the story on their homepage this afternoon, with the World News, Feminist and Atheist Sub-Reddits garnering in excess of 1000 comments around the article linked to on irishtimes.com.
The Irish Times’ own front page story, published online last night just after midnight has been linked to almost 7,000 times on twitter.
On Facebook, the article has been engaged with over 33,000 times, with 15,000 people engaging in discussion and commentary on the social networking website.
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