Take a wild guess what happened to the use of the word “Nazi” on Twitter during Thursday’s World Cup match between Germany and the United States. Just guess.
When Germany scored, U.S. fans tweeted “Nazi” … a lot
Alex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic.
Between the 11:35 a.m. (roughly 25 minutes or so prior to the game) and 2:03 p.m. tweets that contained the word "Nazi" or "Nazis" at a rate of 3.4 tweets per second. Deadspin's Reuben Fischer-Baum used a script and graphed out when Twitter hit peak Nazi:
You'll notice the tweets spiked when Germany's Thomas Müeller scored. Further, if you run a search on Topsy, an organization that aggregates Tweets/Twitter data, you'll notice that there are more "Nazi" tweets in the last two days than there have been in a month. Some of that is due to a Nazi-themed political campaign video from Indonesia that went viral, but over 43,000 "Nazi" tweets were tweeted on the day of the match:
The U.S. plays Belgium on July 1, so get your jokes about waffles and the crippling French-Flemish linguistic divide ready.
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