Ben Carson is getting a good taste of the scrutiny that comes with being the Republican presidential frontrunner.
Carson has been saying out-there stuff for months, but it’s gotten less attention. Recall his recent statement that the Holocaust could have been prevented if Jewish civilians had guns.
Our analytics partners at Zignal Labs visualize the degree to which Carson has finally come under the klieg lights. Look at how press coverage of Carson has spiked over the last week. Mentions of Carson increased five-fold on Thursday over his daily average at the beginning of last week:
This GIF shows how Carson has occupied an increasingly large share of the Republican chatter and coverage over each of the last seven days, going from 9 percent a week ago to 31 percent now (That means one in three mentions of the GOP presidential candidates is about Carson):
The pyramid gaffe dominated yesterday’s social media mentions of Carson. One-third of the above Carson mentions also mentioned Egypt!
The news has even broken through in Egypt. Since Tuesday, Zignal has tracked more than 120,000 Geo-coded Tweets about Ben Carson. About 150 of those came from Egypt. That’s more mentions than any other candidate, including Donald Trump.