Barack Obama Charlottesville anti-racism tweet becomes most popular ever

While Donald Trump refuses to unilaterally condemn the white supremacist march which occurred in Charlottesville over the weekend, a tweet from Barack Obama asking for tolerance and peace has become the most popular one on the platform.

Three million people have liked his tweet, which shows him looking in a window at children of all different races.

Quoting Nelson Mandela, the former US president wrote:

The first tweet was ‘liked’ more than 2.3 million times on Monday evening, with over six million interactions in total for the three tweets.

The violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend shocked the nation.

A gathering of hundreds of white nationalists took a deadly turn on Saturday when a car ploughed into a group of counter-protesters and killed at least one person.

Two police officers were killed when a helicopter monitoring the protests crashed.

Donald Trump, the US president was criticised across the political spectrum for his initial response to the protests, in which he said “many sides” were involved.

On Monday, under pressure to deliver a revised statement, Mr Trump denounced neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan as criminals and thugs.

Ariana Grande previously held the record for the most-liked tweet of all time for her response to the Manchester terror attack:

 The third most-liked tweet is Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscars selfie tweet: