Comedian Kunal Kamra and Republic TV editor Arnab Goswami are no strangers to going viral or astronomical engagement statistics.
Kamra, on Tuesday, 28 January, posted a video on Twitter in which he can be heard confronting Goswami’s journalism while both were in a flight. He captioned the video, “I did this for my hero...I did it for Rohit,” referring to Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula, who killed himself in 2016 alleging harassment by the government.
However, Goswami doesn’t react throughout the length of the video.
Unsurprisingly, the video captured the popular imagination among a sharply divided audience. However, regardless of the reaction to the episode, the tweet did, as millennials say, ‘break the internet’. Or at the least, effected substantial dents on the internet.
Media monitoring company Meltwater India compiled a list of telling statistics that illustrate how “the nation” reacted to the fracas on social media.
Capturing Twitterverse’s Imagination
In a 21-hour period between 4 pm on Tuesday, when the video was published on Twitter, and 1 pm on Wednesday, 114,000 different Twitter users reacted to Kamra’s tweet. It is likely that one user may have posted multiple tweets on the issue.
Emojis Tell a Story
At a time when emojis have emerged as the preferred mode of digital expression, an analysis of the emojis over the 21-hour duration suggests that Twitterverse was thoroughly entertained by the one-sided face-off.
As the graphic below illustrates, laughter and amused emojis were the most used to react to the fracas.
Total Mentions
According to Meltwater, ‘total mentions’ provides insight into the overall volume of social and editorial content over a given time period. 387,000 mentions in 21 hours translates to 307 mentions every minute.
Goswami, perhaps, may not have anticipated his silence could garner such numbers.
By 9:30 pm, Indigo airlines had to acknowledge the reactions online and give their point of view. Indigo responded to the issue by banning Kamra from flying and by 10:00 pm, this verdict had caught the attention of people online and social media mentions reached 35,995.
“By 11 pm twitter conversations reached an all-time high with 36,074 mentions,” said a representative of Meltwater India.
Sentiment Analysis
While Twitterverse certainly appeared to find the episode entertaining, this incident, as well as Indigo and Air India’s ban, did not go down well with the people on Twitter overall. This was prompted primarily by the use of language by Kamra, the ban imposed on him.
Meltwater clarified that the negative sentiment is not a reflection against Kamra or Goswami as a whole but more about sub-topics within the episode.
About 72% of the sentiment online was negative wherein people discussed Kamra’s style of journalism, whether it was harassment or not as well discussing the airlines ban on Mr. Kamra flying.
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