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Twitter pledged to improve employee diversity. Reuters/Kacper Pempel

Twitter erupted on Monday with “Daquan/Dequan” comments. It’s the same fictitious character, but with two variant spellings.

The hot topic received a total of 117,000 mentions, as calculated by Brandwatch; but which was more popular?

According to Brandwatch’s data, Daquan had more than 100,000 mentions and was used much more than Dequan, which had a mere 17,000 references. Some of the top Twitter authors who talked about the fictional character were @YahBoyDaquan, @RealRaymondJ and @FvckFros_.

@RealRaymondJ, who has a following topping 60,000, claims to have started the trend. By Tuesday, however, the account appeared to have moved on.

“Ya Boy Daquan,” a “parody” account, has more than 45,000 followers on the 140-character social media site even though it’s been active for barely 24 hours, but the spoof account continued to tweet into Tuesday, even though Brandwatch found that conversation around both iterations of the name dwindled by half by the following day.

For those who aren’t sure, Daquan (or Dequan) is a made-up character that thousands of Twitter followers began to make comments on with stereotypical puns. While some thought they were funny, others found them offensive.

Part of what seemingly made Daquan the Twitter phenom du jour, was the fact that people began to attack the posts by saying they weren’t in jest, but in fact, derogatory. At first, some people weren’t sure if Daquan was a Twitter creation or a real person, but alas, many netizens have cleared the air that he is just a character.

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