This past year was a horrible morass of terrible news events — but which ones made the most impact on our society? Echelon Insights charted some 184.5 million Twitter mentions to show what America was tweeting about most in 2014.

The second part of the chart, which describes the "weekly share of news conversation by story," shows similar trends: Ferguson, the Eric Garner verdict, the Ebola virus crisis, the midterm elections and geopolitical crises in Israel, Russia and Ukraine were huge topics this year.

Finally, Echelon Insights parsed Twitter mentions based on political affiliations to identify the topics and people most discussed by liberals and conservatives. The trends are fairly telling: Liberal activists, like most of Twitter, focused on the racially tinged cases and protests surrounding Brown and Garner's deaths, while conservative activists tended to focus on guns, Iraq and Benghazi. Unsurprisingly, eveyone had something to say about Obama.

h/t KnowMore