Twitter interest in final debate remains high

The final presidential debate is holding its own on Twitter Monday night, despite the time conflict with the National League Championship game between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals. 

More than one million tweets were sent in the first half hour of the debate, according to Twitter, which is on pace with the number sent by this point in the first two presidential debates. 

Mitt Romney's campaign promoted a nationwide trend on Twitter's top topics for the day, using the same hashtag his team did for the first presidential debate: #CantAfford4More.

Obama's campaign pushed back with the hashtag #StrongerWithObama, which was nationally trending about halfway through the debate.

Twitter is tracking the hashtags #debates and #lynndebate, and the latter as well as other variations continue to trend even as conversation about baseball ebbs and flows. Analytics from Topsy gathered by Twitter also shows rising interest on the microblogging service in foreign policy topics, particularly Benghazi.  

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is also having a moment on Twitter, likely raising the profile of the military funding bill for thousands of Americans tuning into the presidential debate while simultaneously monitoring Twitter.

The group Stop NDAA asked Twitter users to get the hashtag trending during Monday night's final presidential debate, which is focused on foreign policy. 

They achieved their goal with some help from Anonymous, the hacker activist group.

Updated at 9:55 p.m.

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