Morgan Wallen Caught Saying Racist Remark
Country music artist Morgan Wallen has seen a relatively quick rise to fame. The East Tennessee native (from Sneedville) won the new artist of the year award in November from the Country Music Association and has had four number one songs on the Billboard country airplay chart.
On Tuesday, video surfaced in which one of Wallen’s neighbors caught him yelling the ‘n-word’ after a night out with friends. According to Variety and other sources, Cumulus, Sirius XM and other media immediately ordered their stations to remove Wallen’s music from their playlists as a result.
Wallen, who’s been indefinitely suspended from his record label, apologized in a statement on Thursday. Still, he’s received plenty of backlash throughout the music industry and from plenty of others.
But what has the conversation on social media been like? Thankfully, we have the help of Social Studio to help answer that. For this, a simple search of the keywords “Morgan” and “Wallen” should be enough to gauge the conversation.
As of 4:30 pm ET on Feb. 4, there were 94,646 posts using both “Morgan” and “Wallen.” And not surprisingly, the conversation was a whopping 71.1% negative. Below is another indicator, from a word cloud generated by Social Studio.
There aren’t many negative words from the word cloud, though words like ‘dangerous,’ are important to mention because it’s the name of his latest album. With this in mind, these results could be a bit skewed.
Still, other aspects from the search to note are the demographic largely responsible for the online conversation (25-34), as well as the majority of posters on the topic being female. Nearly 60% of the posts tracked were from women.
According to TMZ, which leaked the initial footage, the NAACP extended an invitation to Wallen on Thursday, to educate him on the use of the racial slur used.
We’ll continue to monitor this and other events from our perch on the fourth floor of the College of Communication & Information and the Adam Brown Social Media Command Center.