【Italy】

As the number of ways to watch Monday's presidential debate grows,Italy Twitter has taken its own twist on how to get you to not only watch but also participate in the event.

The microblogging site has released its official debate hashtags that, for the first time, this year include a corresponding emoji. Twitter users can follow along with the debate by tweeting and searching for #Debates and #Debates2016, the company announced jointly with the Commission on Presidential Debates Thursday.

The hashtags and emoji add to Twitter's broader efforts around the election, which will include livestreaming the debate on smartphones and on the company's new connected device apps. Twitter will also livestream the Spanish language feed of the debate via its app Periscope.

Twitter will provide the moderators of the first general debate and the proceeding ones with data on related discussion leading up to the event on the microblogging site, in hopes of providing context and identifying potential questions.

"It’s the moderator's ultimate discretion, but the commission is inviting that public participation," Adam Sharp, Twitter's head of news, government and elections told Mashable. "It happened in one of the primary debates. After 50 years of people yelling at their TVs, for the first time, someone got their question answered live."

Starting Thursday, the two hashtags will generate an emoji with a podium and mic in red, white and blue. It will also be retroactively applied to tweets that use the hashtag -- for instance the tweets that were seen during the 2012 general election debates where #Debates was also championed as the official hashtag.

The hashtags and emoji are just two new elements of Twitter's big effort to encourage more activity on among its useres. Most significantly, Twitter is hosting a livestream of the event with a side-by-side feed of tweets in partnership with Bloomberg Media.

"When we look at political events, it has become clear that Twitter is the ultimate companion to the live television," Sharp said. "Whether it's the Super Bowl or the debates, it makes it a community fair. Twitter has brought that experience back into American homes. It allows us to watch TV together on America’s biggest couch and pull on each other’s sleeves."

Indeed, Twitter has long cast itself as the go-to place for live conversation around news, entertainment, sports and politics. At a time when its stock is down and user growth is stagnant, Twitter is hoping to reinvigorate activity on the network.

During the first presidential debate of 2012, 10 million tweets were sent. Around that time, the network had 170 million monthly active users. It is now up to more than 313 million.

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Promoting a hashtag is Twitter's effort to encourage more unified conversation at a time when each network with access to the broadcast rights could try to promote its own.

Twitter users do not need to use the hashtag for tweets to appear during the livestream of the debate. Instead, a curated feed is generated based on a list of terms, including candidates names and debate topics. That feed is not personalized to which Sharp said there's an important benefit.

"The objective of the event is a public conversation... to have an exchange of ideas so having an experience where viewers are sharing that experience with people whose viewpoints that might not normally be exposed to is an enhancement in the spirit of the democracy of the event," Sharp said.

That could change in the future. The Commission on Presidential Debates and Twitter will be tracking the level of conversation during Monday's and the following debates.