WHEN Twitter hit a record for tweets-per-second earlier this month, it wasn't because of a breaking news event or big TV surprise.

No, it was when a bunch of anime fans in Japan were watching an airing of Castle in the Sky, and all took to Twitter in the same second.

The one-second peak of 143,199 tweets in one second was about 25 times greater than usual - on average, there is about 5700 tweets a second.

The flurry of tweets was sparked by a moment in the film, where it has become customary to tweet a Japanese word that roughly translates as "balus", according to The Atlantic.

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