The geography of hate speech on twitter

[MillCreek]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/05/30/187280870/haters-gonna-hate-as-shown-on-a-map?ft=1&f=1001

http://users.humboldt.edu/mstephens/hate/hate_map.html#

Interesting.  I see that the Aberdeen area is a hotspot for racist and homophobic tweets.

[Tallpine]

Scotland 

[Gowen]

I thought a homophobe was someone who is afraid of words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings?

[AZRedhawk44]

...And what does the heat map of twitter users in general look like?

There's big pockets in there where people just think twitter is for twits, and don't use it.

[Jamisjockey]

Whoever came up with that idea can go eat a bag of pickles.  What a waste of brainpower. 

[Regolith]

I really don't understand the map. It doesn't follow population density at all, which makes me suspect its veracity. For instance, two of the three "warm spots" in central Nevada are hovering over fairly small towns - one is in the general region of Ely (which I guess does have a federal prison, so maybe there's something to that one), while the other looks like it's over nothing - it's a little too far west to be Austin (which has less than 300 or so people anyway), and I can't think of any other towns in that area (edit: strike that, it may be Tonopah. Maybe.)

So are they really saying that there are more homophobic tweets coming out of the middle of nowhere than say, Los Angeles?

[birdman]

Notice that the stats were obtained by having a team of private liberal arts california college undergrads look at the messages and determine if they were hate or not, including subjective things like whether the N word was used racially or non-offensively.  Also, tweets have pictures, names, locations, etc that would further contaminate the subjective judgement.  (Ie, a black guy in the Bronx saying the N word is likely going to give a different subjective impression than a white guy in Idaho saying the same thing).

This study is crap.

[wuluf]

""cripple" is hate speech now...

[Monkeyleg]

Soon to be joined by "gimp", I suppose.

[Jamisjockey]

Notice that the stats were obtained by having a team of private liberal arts california college undergrads look at the messages and determine if they were hate or not, including subjective things like whether the N word was used racially or non-offensively.  Also, tweets have pictures, names, locations, etc that would further contaminate the subjective judgement.  (Ie, a black guy in the Bronx saying the N word is likely going to give a different subjective impression than a white guy in Idaho saying the same thing).

This study is crap.

Not to mention if you zoom the map in, there are little pockets.  Zoomed out it looks like the entire country is full of hate.
This whole thing is upside down out the gate.  Not even close to scientific.

[Tallpine]

What if I hate twitter ?   

[Brad Johnson]

The majority of tweets with "racial slurs" occur in the areas of highest population densities.  Imagine that.  

Brad