Racists Tweets Reflects a Racist Geography

Screenshot via geocommons

The spike in racist tweets that followed President Obama’s re-election came from the southeastern part of the U.S., according to a group of geography experts that mapped out the origins of the bigoted comments.

The New York Daily News:

Tweets calling the president a “monkey” or using racial epithets prompted a group of geography experts to try and break down whether the hateful language was more prevalent in some areas of the country than others.

As it turns out, it was.

The bigoted tweets serve as a “useful reminder that technology reflects the society in which it is based, both the good and the bad,” said geography research group Floating Sheep.

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Among the group’s findings is that the highest prevalence of hate speech on Twitter can be found in Alabama and Mississippi. Tennessee, Georgia and Louisiana also supplied a high ratio of bigoted tweets.

More analysis from Floating Sheep:

The prevalence of post-election racist tweets is not strictly a southern phenomenon as North Dakota (3.5), Utah (3.5) and Missouri (3) have very high LQs.  Other states such as West Virginia, Oregon and Minnesota don’t score as high but have a relatively higher number of hate tweets than their overall twitter usage would suggest.

...Keep in mind we are measuring tweets rather than users and so one individual could be responsible for many tweets and in some cases (most notably in North Dakota, Utah and Minnesota) the number of hate tweets is small and the high LQ is driven by the relatively low number of overall tweets. Nonetheless, these findings support the idea that there are some fairly strong clustering of hate tweets centered in southeastern U.S. which has a much higher rate than the national average.

—Posted by Tracy Bloom.