In soccer, a ‘red card’ is handed out by the referee to a player who has committed a gross misconduct or two less severe infractions. During this years World Cup, fans of Team USA and American media outlets each deserve one.

A glaring form of misconduct was transgressed by fans who were apparently rooting for the USA during a recent World Cup match between the US and Germany. Social media outlet Twitter was bombarded with over 30,000 tweets all utilizing Nazi slang, often referring to the German team, specific players or even referees.

While Twitter has often been filled with hate speech during or following sporting matches – such as in the case of the recent Euro-League Basketball Championship in which Spanish fans tweeted anti-Semitic slurs following Real Madrid’s defeat by Maccabi Tel Aviv – below’s eye opening graph really brings home the amount of bigotry that is still found in the general public.

What is worse is that one cannot simply brush it off by using the common refrain “it is only a handful of people”.  Trash talking is one thin. Using derogatory slang such as calling someone a Nazi just because they represent Germany is another. Over 30,000 people feeding off of each others comments is a completely unprecedented level of hate.

Reuben Fischer-Baum, a blogger who writes for Regressing, an offshoot blog from the website Deadspin, compiled the data and performed what he termed a “Twitter roundup” upon seeing a spike in the use of the word “Nazi” on Twitter.

“About a half hour before the game we saw an uptick of ‘Nazi’ tweets. We thought it might be interesting to track, so we began tracking them,” Fisher-Baum told Breaking Israel News.

At certain points during the game, tweets spiked when the German team were advancing. In a specific incident, when a referee raised his arm in signal to make a call, people took to Twitter describing the signal as the Nazi salute. Tweets came in fast and furious with 3.4 tweets per second containing the word “Nazi.”

“There is no way to tell how many of these tweets are from Americans, and we are careful not to state that these were all American tweets,” Fischer-Baum explained. “Nevertheless, Americans make up roughly 25 percent of all Twitter-users, by far the highest figure for any country, and the pattern of the tweets makes it clear that many of the people tweeting ‘Nazi’ or ‘Nazis’ were following the US-Germany result closely.”

Fischer-Baum took to his own Twitter account a few days after the match and revealed, “Some more info on that Nazi Twitter stuff, b/c people have been asking. 51% were retweets, 0.3% were geocoded and 78% of those were from US.”

What is perhaps equally as troubling as the tweets themselves is that only one US news sources reported this incident, the New York Daily News. No other major US news source reported the story, bringing to mind the question as to whether they were uninformed, uninterested, or undisturbed by the racist and hateful remarks made in the Twittersphere.

Numerous international news sources picked up the story immediately, while US media outlets such as New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, and many others stayed silent on the issue.

Fischer-Baum elucidated that “Twitter data is available to anyone with a Twitter account through a simple search. The data-heavy approach we took for this project is a bit more complicated, but still available to all Twitter users.”

The anti-semitic tweets in Spain resulted in a lawsuit. It remains to be seen what, if any, will be the repercussions of these “hate-tweets” during the US-Germany soccer game. Whatever they may be, thousands of Twitter account names and ID’s have been forwarded around the globe, together with the offensive tweets. While some may be anonymous, others are not. So, when tweeting, a rule of thumb for the wise; “Be careful what you tweet for, as anyone may read it.”