3 ms·
"I used a racial slur as the search term because I thought of it as the strongest evidence that a tweet might contain racist harassment. I restricted the sample
by kutkloon7 10y ago
"I used a racial slur as the search term because I thought of it as the strongest evidence that a tweet might contain racist harassment. I restricted the sample to users who had a history of using offensive language, and I only included subjects who appeared to be a white man or who were anonymous."
Right, because white men are the only people are the only ones who can be racist. If you have to rely on a criterion like this, that's a very good sign that the method you use is not objective.
Besides that, I really like the reply the author chose, the message and its phrasing seem very effective, while staying respectful towards the tweeter.
- BigJeffeRonaldo 10y agoThey were guilty of being white.
- cooper12 10y agoYou're reading a lot into something they didn't even claim. They explain why they had to choose a specific race in the following paragraph: > It was essential to keep the race and gender of the subjects constant to test my central question: How would reactions to my sanctioning message change based on the race of the bot sending the message? Why they chose people who were white shouldn't really matter as their conclusion was not "white men are racists". It was just something that had to be kept constant and grouping on race is not something unfamiliar for researchers, especially since in this case the whole experiment was based on the races of the sender and receiver. (Also note that it's much easier to distinguish between black and white rather than if they made the profile pictures different shades on the Fitzpatrick Scale)