CallEmOut

I first saw #CallEmOut on November 13, 2009. The first Archivist search found messages back to November 7. It did not start this way, but by November 13 it had become

"To xxx: You lied about health reform during the House debate last week so we're calling you out. #CallEmOut"

It appears to be supporters of health care reform expressing their ire at the actions of members of the House who opposed the bill.

It was not exactly a groundswell -- Archivist found only 227 messages. Since that reached back to the 7th it had to have included all the messages from the 13th.

I did an initial check of the names of members of the House. There was a lot of duplication, and since there were only a few more tweets than there had been votes against the bill many opponents did not get the message.

The search was discontinued on April 5, 2010. By that time the original impetus was long forgotten, and it had become a infrequently used phrase for interpresonal relations. The total number of messages was 762. The figure shows their distribution over time.

There was a big spike in November and then a rapid decay to almost nothing.

The data files are #callemout.xml and callemout.txt, which is a tab delimited file that can be read with Excel.

© G. R. Boynton, 2010
April 5, 2010