How hateful is your section of the country? Twitter provides the answer.
Here’s another fascinating project coming from big data. With geocoded tweets, researchers can map all kinds of things spouting from our fingertips. This latest project and website tracked hate speech according to location.
According to The Huffington Post:
The most hateful tweeters in the United States tend to live in the eastern half of the country, according to a new map that pinpoints hate speech from Twitter across country.
The map, created by geography students at Humboldt State University in California, looks at more than 150,000 geocoded tweets (tweets that say where the user is located) between June 2012 and April 2013, sorting for those that contained a racist, homophobic or anti-disability word. The researchers then decided whether or not the tweet was using the word in a hateful way.
You can explore each category layer separately and zoom in to almost the county level. One of the weird things is that the hate speech is almost exclusively coming from the eastern half of the country, and the reddest section (red being the highest volume of hateful verbiage) was a large section running horizontally in the middle.
What do you think this is? There are obviously more liberal states, such as California, on the western half of the country, so the lack of red on the Pacific coast didn’t surprise me, but for the hate speech to be almost completely originating from the eastern half? That I didn’t see coming.
Explore the site for yourself here.
Cute- of course there is no way to ascertain how this breaks down as a % of hateful tweets- I guess that based on this nobody in WY uses queer in a hateful manner might be one analysis. Or does nobody in WY tweet? Of are the tweets in WY using the term queer all friendly?
We’re missing the scary part of this story- that our tweets are available for data mining and parsing.
“Or does nobody in WY tweet?”
Frequency of overall tweet activity definitely has something to do with it. They say the normalize for total tweet volume, still if their are no tweets in an area than WY is going to look saintly compared to NY.
The other thing is the researchers read the tagged tweets and made a subjective determination as to whether the context was bigoted or not. Given that their west coast based, it may lend some serious bias into their analysis. (eg if they think all southerns are racist to begin with, that would bias their interpretation)
It looks very similar to a basic population density map of the US. It’s probably very similar to a map of general Twitter usage.
http://www.mapofusa.net/us-population-map.gif