Although escalations may have plateaued between China and India following a deadly confrontation that saw 20 Indian soldiers killed along a disputed border in the Himalayas, the sheer gravity of the situation has been articulated on Twitter in the form of a hashtag, 'World War 3'.
The #WorldWar3 hashtag has been Tweeted almost 200,000 times around the world, with many of those tweets showing concern about potential fallout between two of the world’s most populous countries.
So I wake up to #worldwar3 trending.
— CrownOfLight³🐯 (@CrownOfLight3) June 17, 2020
🐯🔥💯 pic.twitter.com/gD2Ax6uDHE
People also engaged their curiosity about the World War 3 hashtag through Google, which saw a considerate spike in searches for the Phrase from January 15 through January 17.
This is not the first time the hashtag has made an appearance near the top of global Twitter trends in 2020.
The last time #WorldWar3 trended near the top of the social media platform around the world was on January 3, when the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard's foreign operations branch, Qassem Suleimani, was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad.
#worldwar3 is trending for the second time this year within the span of six months I’m not surprised anymore it’s 2020 pic.twitter.com/RvJIQ1P9WB
— VICTORIA AKPAN (@VICTORI60162793) June 17, 2020
At the time, the ominous "WWIII" hashtag quickly rose near the top of global Twitter trends with more than 200,000 tweets, followed by the phrase 'World War 3' - which also trended.
It did not, however, take the top spot on Twitter trends after Suleimani's death. "Iran" received more than 2 million mentions in tweets on the day of the assassination.
As for the recent deadly border tensions between China and India, both sides have given competing versions of the violence on Monday.
Beijing most recently said that it did not want to see any additional clashes on the border, and insisted that both sides would continue to resolve this issue through dialogue and negotiations".
