While the Indian elections hogged the social media limelight a few months ago, there is no parallel to the innumerable “tweets” generated during and after the Brazilian football team’s total capitulation to the Germans. During the 120-odd minutes of the match, a record 35.6 million tweets were sent out by Twitter users, many of whom were as shell-shocked as Brazil’s defence.
The third, fourth and fifth German goals scored in the space of four minutes had users tweeting at an incredible rate. By the fifth goal, there were 580,166 tweets per minute. People needed just a social platform to give vent to the incredible scoreline which has been dubbed as ‘Collapcao’ (after the Brazilian term for their team ‘the Selecao’).
By the end of the match, while some Brazilian fans were calling for the head of the coach, Phil Scolari, many of the players as well as Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff, German fans, including celebrities such as tennis players Steffi Graf and Boris
Becker and model Heidi Klum, found it difficult to come to terms with the scoreline.While most of the rest of the world, the neutrals so to speak, had anticipated a hard-fought German win, the lopsided scoreline led to several funny pictures and trends (memes) getting popular. One had German striker Thomas Muller as Rambo, another popular trend replaced the statue of Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janeiro with that of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. To add to the humiliation, pictures of crying Brazilians were plastered across the front pages of newspapers across the world (those in the right time-zones).