Earlier this summer, "Game of Thrones" for one of the most shocking climaxes to an episode in the history of television. It's no surprise that, in a season of end-of-the-year lists, that a particular episode of George R.R. Martin's masterstroke ranks as one of Twitter's most emotional moments of 2014. Fan-based website Winter Is Coming reports that Telegraph Hill, an "expert TV research agency," conducted analysis of Twitter conversations during prime time to determine a list of The Most Talked About" TV moments of the year.

In press release: "Over a billion tweets were analyzed by Telegraph Hill to identify the most emotionally resonant TV moments. Positive feelings were the most likely to be shared with "love" the most tweeted emotional word in the study, followed by "good" and "happy". The next most popular tag was "hate", which was only shared at a ratio of 1:6 to happy. The evidence shows that good news is more amenable to sharing and re-tweeting than negativity. The exceptions to this are around "hot" emotions such as anger. There were a very high number of angry tags found around The Great British Bake Off, following 'Bin-gate" where the contestant binned his Baked Alaska. The study was able to identify how Twitter can enable an online form of "emotional contagion", similar to that seen in crowds at sporting events, and some tweets were re-tweeted hundreds of times."

Telegraph Hill clarified that, while several of the social media feedback came from reality TV favorites like "Real Housewives," "Big Brother," and "Keeping Up With The Kardashians," it should be pointed out that "the top two emotional moments involve 'traditional', high quality British drama and cinematic-quality TV."

"The Mountain and the Viper," an episode from fourth season of HBO's smash hit "Game of Thrones," is among Top Ten TV Moments," landing at the No. 2 spot. According to the study, "Oberyn's death in Game of Thrones was shocking and grotesque and viewers turned to twitter to express their horror and sadness with over 404,000 tweets about the death."

In the fabled episode, in a fight to the death against Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane (played by Icelandic strongman competitor and actor Hafthór Júlíus Björnsson), Prince "The Red Viper" Oberyn (played by Chilean-American actor Pedro Pascal) let his hubris to get the better of him after successfully wounding and disarming Clegane, interrogating him to confess to the rape and murder of Martell's sister. However, Oberyn is caught off-guard and suffers a fatal blow to the head by Clegane.

While introduced as a brand new character to the franchise, the heroic and devilishly charming Oberyn won the hearts of the show's fanbase, but his death was tantamount to Season 3's "Red Wedding" episode.

"The Empty Hearse," the first episode of the third series of the BBC television series "Sherlock" starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Doctor John Watson held that episode back from the top spot.

Given that the figures are based on twitters users in the U.K. and not stateside, it is unclear whether Nielsen, which has taken public-focused hashtags into account when documenting TV ratings over the last couple of years, has conducted their own study.