A tweet written by former US president Barack Obama in the wake of the white supremacist rally in Virginia has become the most liked message ever posted on Twitter.
“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background or his religion…” Obama wrote on Saturday, quoting late South African leader and Nelson Mandela, whom Obama has called a “personal hero.”
The tweet was posted after Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal who was protesting the white nationalist rally in the city of Charlottesville, was killed when a driver slammed into a crowd of demonstrators.
The message by the 44th – and first black – US president had been liked nearly 3 million times by early Wednesday, making it the all-time most liked tweet, according to Twitter’s official feed.
It had been re-tweeted more than 1.2 million times.
Below the message is a picture of Obama greeting a group of young kids looking at him from a window.
After the initial tweet Obama followed with two more quotes from Mandela’s autobiography “The Long Walk to Freedom.”
“People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love,” Obama wrote. “For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”(dpa/NAN)
