One tweet, stripped of its context, was enough. On 27 March 2014 the account of The Colbert Report posted a line lifted from the previous night’s segment about Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder and his charitable foundation for Native Americans: an offer to show the Asian community the host cared by founding a mock foundation with a slur in its name. On air, inside the segment, it was a joke about racism. On its own in a timeline it read as a racist joke. The tweet was later deleted. That evening the activist Suey Park called for the show to be cancelled under the hashtag #CancelColbert and asked her followers to make it trend.
Measured through the Crimson Hexagon ForSight platform, the hashtag carried 85,340 tweets on 28 March, of which 48,410 were retweets. The largest share, 39,065, came from the United States, though the argument travelled as far as Bahrain, Botswana and Bhutan. An estimated 70 per cent of the American tweets came from men. Setting aside roughly a third of the sample classified as neutral, the overall sentiment was negative, and a word cloud built from 20,000 of the tweets showed what the argument was actually about.
The interesting part was not the volume but the mechanism. A message written to be read inside a sequence was circulated without it, and the people receiving it second-hand had none of the background needed to interpret it. What the hashtag measured was the gap between the two.