Image source: The Toronto Star
It was the anthem heard ‘round the world–or, at least, crystal clear north of the border.
As has been well-documented by now, a so-called “lone wolf” member of the Canadian singing quartet The Tenors went rogue last night, changing the lyrics to “O Canada” at the MLB All-Star Game to suit a political agenda.
There have been dozens of stories published since then showing samples of Twitter backlash from Canadians (the Canadian anthem wasn’t shown on the U.S. broadcast last night, and probably for good reason).
But at MediaMiser, we wanted to know just how quickly people jumped on this as the evening progressed.
As expected, Twitter backlash was quick and furious especially from those watching along during the game’s first few minutes: tweets mentioning “O Canada” jumped 236 per cent from 8:04 p.m. eastern time to 8:05 p.m. eastern time. It was at around this time that many users, who had initially reacted with confusion over the issue, finally began to realize the whole thing was planned.
Correction: The Tenors altered O Canada lyrics in support of All Lives Matter. pic.twitter.com/Q0i6qqLB4Y
— Bill Cooney (@BillCooney) July 13, 2016
It wasn’t until about an hour after the gaffe that chatter really picked up. At 9:16 eastern time, tweets jumped 428 per cent, and were sustained at that level until around 9:21.
Twitter mentions peaked between 9:16 and 9:21 eastern time, thanks to various media outlets like Deadspin and Global News jumping on the story about an hour after it happened. Twitter chatter was sustained for the rest of the evening, and finally began to die down about four hours after the incident.
Even more interesting, perhaps, is the regional breakdown of who was tweeting about “O Canada” last night.
Even though 67 per cent of Twitter users who identified a location were from Canada, nearly a quarter were from the U.S. and almost 10 per cent were international users.
Tweets about “O Canada” were sent from India, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, South Africa and Nigeria, to name a few places.
