In numbers: Here's how Twitter responded when Kunal Kamra gave Arnab Goswami a mild dose of his own medicine
Sadness was expressed and anger. And, as always, there were plenty of hashtags floating around.
Unless you are completely off social media, you would likely have watched or heard or read about what went down on an IndiGo flight headed to Lucknow on Tuesday. If you haven’t, here’s what happened: comedian Kunal Kamra and Republic TV editor Arnab Goswami were on the same flight. Kamra being Kamra confronted Arnab and gave him, well, the Arnab treatment.
A video of his monologue immediately went viral and took social media, especially Twitter, by storm.
IndiGo quickly banned Kamra from flying with it for six months. Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Puri weighed in on the airline’s controversial decision and, not long after, the state carrier Air India too declared the comedian persona non grata.
Meltwater India, a media intelligence company, collected some interesting data about how the controversy played out on social media. They analysed activity related to this incident on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, blogs and forums from 4 pm Tuesday to 10 am Wednesday.
Here are some of their findings:
At least 3,20,667 social media mentions of Kunal Kamra’s monologue, and IndiGo and Air India’s response to it.
The Twitter chatter about the video blew up right after it was uploaded at 4:17 pm. And the internet was divided on supporting Kamra’s monologue against Arnab.
By 9:30 pm, IndiGo had to acknowledge the reactions online. It responded by banning Kamra from flying with it for six months. By 10 pm this verdict caught the attention of people online and social media mentions hit 35,995.
Top emotions expressed on the issue were sadness and anger. Check out this fun chart.
By 11 pm, Twitter conversations reached an all-time high of 36,074 mentions.
The incident as well as IndiGo and Air India’s bans, didn’t go down well with the Twitterati. About 72% of the reactions to the bans were negative.
#KunalKamra was mentioned 36,348 times, followed by #BoycottIndigo with 28,277 mentions, and #ArnabGoswami with 17,499 mentions.
Here are some of the top positive and negative keywords that people used while talking about the incident.
