Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election

[swag]

http://www.floatingsheep.org/2012/11/mapping-racist-tweets-in-response-to.html

During the day after the 2012 presidential election we took note of a spike in hate speech on Twitter referring to President Obama's re-election, as chronicled by Jezebel (thanks to Chris Van Dyke for bringing this our attention). It is a useful reminder that technology reflects the society in which it is based, both the good and the bad. Information space is not divorced from everyday life and racism extends into the geoweb and helps shapes its contours; and in turn, data from the geoweb can be used to reflect the geographies of racist practice back onto the places from which they emerged.

Using DOLLY we collected all the geocoded tweets from the last week (beginning November 1) with racist terms that also reference the election in order to understand how these everyday acts of explicit racism are spatially distributed. Given the nature of these search terms, we've buried the details at the bottom of this post in a footnote [1].

Given our interest in the geography of information we wanted to see how this type of hate speech overlaid on physical space. To do this we aggregated the 395 hate tweets to the state level and then normalized them by comparing them to the total number of geocoded tweets coming out of that state in the same time period [2]. We used a location quotient inspired measure (LQ) that indicates each state's share of election hate speech tweet relative to its total number of tweets.[3] A score of 1.0 indicates that a state has relatively the same number of hate speech tweets as its total number of tweets. Scores above 1.0 indicate that hate speech is more prevalent than all tweets, suggesting that the state's "twitterspace" contains more racists post-election tweets than the norm.

So, are these tweets relatively evenly distributed? Or do some states have higher specializations in racist tweets? The answer is shown in the map below (also available here in an interactive version) in which the location of individual tweets (indicated by red dots)[4] are overlaid on color coded states. Yellow shading indicates states that have a relatively lower amount of post-election hate tweets (compared to their overall tweeting patterns) and all states shaded in green have a higher amount. The darker the green color the higher the location quotient measure for hate tweets.



. . . more

[Laurian]

1. I see my* red state of Georgia is well represented.

The infamous tweet from the teenager who wants to go to Australia came from Georgia. That's illustrative of the ignorance and hate that abounds here.

*As a Yankee relocated to Georgia, I don't know that I can ever really accept this as "my state".

[Robb]

2. Clearly racists in some states aren't on Twitter.

[ffr]

3. I've never travelled to MS or AL

Now I have to find a reason for why I would!

[swag]

4. I'd like to see a per capita analysis

Some of those gray states must feel quite slighted.

[mechtech]

5. Where do they get their notions?

Isn’t it amusing how some very wealthy white pundits think that this is “their country”, especially after making millions on daily hate speech made up completely from straw men and red herrings?
…………………………..
Rush Limbaugh
“I went to bed last night thinking we are outnumbered,”
“I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country. I don’t know how else you look at this.”

@Mechtech to Rush
I wonder if Paspahegh territory Chief Wahunsenacawh felt that way in 1607 as his land was renamed Jamestown by Captain John Smith’s colony?
Or maybe the Pokanoket chief Massasoit expressed similar sentiments as William Brewster and Myles Standish renamed his land Plymouth Colony in 1621…
…………………………………………
Bill O’Reilly
“The white establishment is now the minority,”
“And the voters, many of them, … want stuff.”
“… People feel that they are entitled to things …”

@Mechtech to Bill-O
Perhaps the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II, said something like that when he first met Hernán Cortés, just before Moctezuma was killed for his gold…
These two white guys cannot stomach the reality that there are people of other colors in this country, and more coming every day... How incredibly ironic!