An Interactive Map of Racist, Homophobic and Ableist Tweets in America

[ismnotwasm]

Created by the datavisualization experts at Floating Sheep, the interactive map was made in response to criticism that a previous map – which plotted the distribution of racial epithets in the wake of Obama's re-election – had arrived at specious conclusions about the relative amount of racist content emanating from Mississippi and Alabama. Via Floating Sheep:

In order to address [one such criticism] , students at Humboldt State manually read and coded the sentiment of [hundreds of thousands of tweets containing homophobic, racist, or ableist slurs] to determine if the given word was used in a positive, negative or neutral manner. This allowed us to avoid using any algorithmic sentiment analysis or natural language processing, as many algorithms would have simply classified a tweet as ‘negative’ when the word was used in a neutral or positive way. For example the phrase ‘dyke’, while often negative when referring to an individual person, was also used in positive ways (e.g. “dykes on bikes #SFPride”). The students were able to discern which were negative, neutral, or positive. Only those tweets used in an explicitly negative way are included in the map... All together, the students determined over 150,000 geotagged tweets with a hateful slur to be negative.
The image up top is the map of all the homophobic tweets deemed hateful. Over at the interactive map, viewers can see similar maps for racist and ableist tweets, and even parse the data to examine the geographic distributions of individual words. The results were compelling. "Even when normalized," write the researchers, "many of the slurs included in our analysis display little meaningful spatial distribution":

http://io9.com/an-interactive-map-of-racist-homophobic-and-ableist-tw-499908637

[Donald Ian Rankin]

1. Isn't that basically a map of population density? N.T.

[ismnotwasm]

2. Hmm maybe let's see

Very close excerpt for a couple of hot spots. Kind of invalidates the whole thing doesn't it?

Edit, on closer examination it's a bit more interesting.

[Quantess]

7. Exactly, the one map tells us nothing without the other.

If somebody took the effort to juxtapose a couple of meaningful maps, it might tell us something meaningful.

Edit to add: it's the missing inference, is what I remember from an argumentation class from several years ago. I think actually a few inferences need to be spelled out more graphically, to show a connection. I get it, but it's not compelling enough.

[surrealAmerican]

3. It appears that they are using the total number of tweets ...

... rather than the percentage of tweets, which would make this basically meaningless.


Nice idea, but botched execution.

[gollygee]

4. Northern Michigan has a very low population density

though there's probably some relationship. A map that showed number of tweets per a certain number of people who live in that area would be best.

[Marr]

5. There are some big differences-- like California.

And the New England states seem to have fewer hate tweets than the South in general, even though the population density is much higher.

[TrollBuster9090]

6. No, but that's a very good point. It should be normalized to population.

It should probably be normalized to population, depending on what the goal of the graphic is.

If the goal is to identify the TOTAL number of racists per region, you can leave the map as is.

If the goal is to identify the PREVALENCE of racism in various reasons, it should be normalized by population.

Somebody mentioned below that it should be percentage of tweets, not total tweets, which would be a proxy method of identifying prevalence of racism.

However, either way, I can see why lots of good liberals who live in the South would be annoyed by this kind of graphic. Let's not tar all Southerners with the same brush. My opinion about the South is that it's not any better or any worse than any other area of the country when it comes to noble or ignoble human traits. Whether noble or ignoble, people just happen to be louder and more active with them in the south. The worst examples of racism were on display in the South in the 60s, through segregation and Jim Crow laws...but don't forget, the Civil Rights Movement also STARTED there. Both the racists AND the anti-racists were most active there. It doesn't take much courage to stand up against segregation if you live in Vermont. It takes a hell of a lot of courage to stand up against segregation in Mississippi.

[ismnotwasm]

8. It looks like they tried to address that in the article

All together, the students determined over 150,000 geotagged tweets with a hateful slur to be negative. Hateful tweets were aggregated to the county level and then normalized by the total number of tweets in each county. This then shows a comparison of places with disproportionately high amounts of a particular hate word relative to all tweeting activity. For example, Orange County, California has the highest absolute number of tweets mentioning many of the slurs, but because of its significant overall Twitter activity, such hateful tweets are less prominent and therefore do not appear as prominently on our map. So when viewing the map at a broad scale, it’s best not to be covered with the blue smog of hate, as even the lower end of the scale includes the presence of hateful tweeting activity.

Even when normalized, many of the slurs included in our analysis display little meaningful spatial distribution. For example, tweets referencing ‘nigger’ are not concentrated in any single place or region in the United States; instead, quite depressingly, there are a number of pockets of concentration that demonstrate heavy usage of the word. In addition to looking at the density of hateful words, we also examined how many unique users were tweeting these words. For example in the Quad Cities (East Iowa) 31 unique Twitter users tweeted the word “nigger” in a hateful way 41 times. There are two likely reasons for higher proportion of such slurs in rural areas: demographic differences and differing social practices with regard to the use of Twitter. We will be testing the clusters of hate speech against the demographic composition of an area in a later phase of this project.

So it's like an preliminary experiment. Not a complete graphic.

And the South does NOT need to be smeared with broad brushed accusations of racism and homophobia, while it slips under the radar further North.