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Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election
- pingou 14y agoThat's interesting, but thankfully they only had 395 tweets so I wonder if you can get something really meaningful with a set of data so small. Looks like there's some correlation with Rommey's voting states though.
- lylejohnson 14y agoAfter reviewing their list of "Top 10 Floating Sheep Maps" that appears in the sidebar, it's a reasonable assumption that this is a site with a certain world view. The readers who agree with that world view (say, /r/politics) won't particularly care about the statistical sample size as long as the results reinforce their beliefs.
- fnayr 14y agoOf course it's correlated with the red states; when the person they didn't want to see win won, they said anything they could to degrade him. Certainly the n word is the easiest and most offensive word to throw out, but that doesn't necessarily imply racism. Though I'm not defending their use of that extremely offensive word, it's highly disingenuous to equate it to racism.
- brudgers 14y agoNonsense.
- omnisci 14y agoCan of worms = opened. The "n word" does imply racism. I'm not going to write a book about it, but I'll just put that out there for you to think about.
- moron 14y agoWhat if I see someone using the word and include their tweet in mine, to tell them what a racist idiot they are? Then my tweet would be counted racist simply because it contains the word. This is not a thought exercise, I watched it happen (the tweeting, not the counting).
- mistercow 14y agoTo paraphrase XKCD, I would say that the word doesn't imply racism, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively, etc.
- fnayr 14y agoFrom wiki: "Racism is usually defined as views, practices and actions reflecting the belief that humanity is divided into distinct biological groups called races and that members of a certain race share certain attributes which make that group as a whole less desirable, more desirable, inferior or superior" A frustrated exclamation of a horribly degrading word to express their anger != A view that African Americans are inferior. It certainly doesn't show class and I'd bet you'd surely find a higher proportion of racists among those who tweeted that word, but calling them all racists? Wrong.
- yardie 14y agoThe n-word is not necessarily racist, if used in the right context. But given the context of most of these tweets it is absolutely used in racist tones, ie. "niggers in the whitehouse!"
- theorique 14y agoUnder which circumstances is it not racist?
- joshuahedlund 14y agoHip-hop lyrics where African Americans use it to describe each other?
- yardie 14y agoUnder the circumstance that you discuss the history and etymology of the word like adults and not a bunch of idiots on xbox live.
- AutoCorrect 14y agoit was a very biased 'study'. from the article, it appears that this person specifically targeted people that were anti-Obama, forgetting entirely all the racists tweets that threatened riot and death if Romney won.
- troels 14y agoThis could have been interesting, but with a sample size of 395, I'm afraid the numbers are very unreliable.
- omnisci 14y agoIf this was a full scientific study, I'd agree. Lets keep in mind that it isn't, and it's just a reflection of what was actually said. It isn't fair to draw conclusions from this such as "Alabama is a racist!?!?", but the data do still say something.
- jedbrown 14y agoIf data are to "say something", they must do so in a statistically rigorous sense. I'm not going to speculate on statistical significance in this particular case.
- gyardley 14y agoWith a sample size of 395, given the intensity of feeling around general elections, all this really does is show that America is staggeringly not racist.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- crusso 14y agoRacism is deplorable, but weren't the threats to kill Romney if he won the election equally deplorable? http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-supporters-on-twitter-issue-threats-to-kill-mitt-romney-on-eve-of-election http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-supporters-on-twitter-... What is any less hateful about them? "I'll personally f*****g kill Romney if he try's some dumb nazi s**t f**k that (sic)," I looked through floatingsheep's other recent blogs and they didn't cover that one. The problem I have with the lack of objectivity on racism is that it's actually counter-productive to solving the problem. Raising the alarm about one type of racism while turning a blind eye to other types of irrational hate smacks of hypocrisy.
- rpm4321 14y agoAgreed. It reminds me a bit of the fallacy of criminalizing "hate speech", which you are seeing in Europe lately. It actually gives the bigots a bit of a legitimate grievance, in that their freedom of speech is being eroded. Besides, personally, if someone is eager to inform me about what an idiot they are, I see no advantage in legally preventing them. I think the cult of political correctness has actually been quite damaging to race relations.
- trebor 14y agoWhat about the people that voted for Obama—just because he's black? Isn't that racist too? What about the people who voted for Obama out of fear of being labeled racist? Isn't that blackmail? I've no idea how widespread those cases are, but I do wonder.
- dogfu6 14y agoWell, on the flip side: I heard multiple "The problem with Republicans is old white guys" comments on NPR and CNN. From respected "pundits" no less. Talk about your sexist, racist , ageist comments! Substituting the words "Democratic" and "young" and "of color" sounds pretty silly. I'm all for free speech, though. There will always be a noise component in political discourse and we Americans have pretty good filters.
- Angostura 14y agoI's difficult to say from context whether that was meant in a racist manner. From a purely factual perspective it is true that GOP votes are older, whiter and male.
- omnisci 14y agoThink about it. If you heard "The problem with Democrats is young minority women" what would that mean to you? Right now, nothing, but if you (assuming you are male) were unable to get a prostate exam without spending $18209389012830 whereas it was, and always was, easy for women to get breast exams for free under their insurance, this statement would mean something.
- engtech 14y agoWere the pundits referring to this interview? “The demographics race we’re losing badly,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-republican-convention-emphasizes-diversity-racial-incidents-intrude/2012/08/29/b9023a52-f1ec-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-republican-convent... I think my favourite comment I heard someone say to describe the Republicans demographics problem is when watching Romney's camp during election night: "It looks like he's at a family reunion."
- no_more_death 14y agoGraham isn't a conservative. He consistently splits from other Republicans. He's criticizing his own party as a party of "angry white guys" when he says this. Surely you don't think Graham considers himself on the same side as "angry white guys"! The article linked does not quote him as an example of racism, but rather as someone inside the Republican Party who is criticizing their own demographic.
- paulhauggis 14y agoHow about the tweets before the election talking about riots if Obama wasn't elected?
- mistercow 14y agoHow about that is only tangentially related?
- mmuro 14y agoUgh. Being from Alabama, this is just sad. But, I guess unsurprising given the majority demographic here. I really hope this election can help move this area of the country forward because this kind of attitude has never helped the South. The only thing I can say is that you reference the county-by-county voting and know that there are lots of blue/purple counties throughout this region.
- nhebb 14y agoThe problem I have with this is that it is needlessly stirring racial divides. 395 tweets out of ~120 million voters? Come on, do something positive for our country like mapping out the tweets of people still needing help from Sandy.
- Anechoic 14y ago395 tweets out of It's 395 geocoded tweets, not 395 tweets total across Twitter.
- greedo 14y agoAnd no metrics on how many of those tweets were from the same people.
- king_jester 14y ago> The problem I have with this is that it is needlessly stirring racial divides. The divides exist, pointing that out doesn't make things worse and helps people be more aware of racism in society.
- danso 14y agoThe divides exist, but this map does virtually nothing to shed illumination on the matter. I think everyone here can figure out why the methodology and sampling size would lead to inaccurate results...and at the same time, I think everyone would also agree that this sampling would vastly undercount the actual amount of racism among our citizenry (as frequent Twitter users have a much different demographic than the voting demographic). Is there a way to see what actual tweets were classified as racist? Or is it just ones that used words commonly accepted to be hate speech? If the latter, then my main issue with this is that this is nothing more than social porn...a way to set the bar for racism so blatantly high that we forget that the most damaging, pernicious kinds of racism are not going to be expressed through explicit language by a few scattered morons.
- Claudus 14y agoI have the exact same problem, I'm sure that there are many racists in our country, but this graphic is pretty garbage. 1) There are about 35 to 40 million Americans on Twitter, (15% of the 78.1% of online Americans). 2) Does the percentage of twitter users per state factor into this, it seems not. 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". This makes no sense to me, unless a single tweet somehow counts multiple times, e.g. "obama monkey monkey monkey monkey". There are more racists tweets than tweets? How is that possible? 4) Is every instance of "monkey" racist? Is it racist to call George Bush a monkey? 5) Was context applied, or is simply using certain word combinations racist? Go to twitter and do the search yourself, many of the tweets are responses to racist tweets or not racist at all. I'm sure there are many racists in America, but this graphic is painting a very misleading picture.
- mjgoins 14y agoMany of these accounts are clearly 4chan-style trolls. Although sadly, it's not the majority.
- hugh4life 14y agoWhat about mapping tweets by black people saying they would riot if Romney won? Your "racism" is too small.
- brandoncor 14y agoFirst of all, how do you filter by "black people" on Twitter? Second, the authors were probably grabbing all tweets that contained certain racial epithets. The word "riot" isn't racist.
- Yoms 14y agoAs a young "minority", living in the South (Appalachia), I just don't get this... People in the South have been as kind, welcoming, and intelligent as people from other areas I've lived/visited. There are idiots on all sides of the political spectrum, and throughout the world. Lets call them idiots and stop trying to map their behavior to demographics. Maybe it's only been my experience, but as a "minority", I can't wait for all this racism talk to end. I'm just a human.
- rwhitman 14y agoI would say this map only shows areas where its socially acceptable to openly vocalize racist thoughts in a public forum.
- glesica 14y agoThis is a really good point IMHO. People say all sorts of things behind closed doors. But self-censorship in public is almost certainly more common in some areas of the country than in others.
- tharris0101 14y agoThe racism that is charted on this map is way less dangerous than the subtle racism on display here on HN. And no, I didn't vote for Obama.
- bryanl 14y agoSpeaking as a black person, I can see cases where racist tweets would have been flagged, but weren't really racist. A black person (in some circles) could say, "Damn, that nigger Obama was reelected!" Is this racist? In this case, the use of "nigger" could be a term of endearment. It would have still been flagged during this survey.