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The 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 cou
by nhebb 14y ago
The 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.
- jessedhillon 14y agoWhy do you respond when you can't even be bothered to read TFA? The criteria used to find the tweets was very clearly described in footnote 1. Regarding your #4: just shut up.
- 1123581321 14y agoWould you please edit your #4 response to be more informative and thoughtful, or remove it? It is currently incendiary and not helpful, and as someone who has exchanged emails with you privately in the past (financial industry software opportunities) I know you can write something better here.
- jessedhillon 14y agoYeah, it's not the most professional way to put things. The question itself is, frankly, ridiculous -- I only see two ways to parse it: 1) This person is asking for a philosophical discussion on the nature of semantics. Given the incendiary context here, if that is a sincere desire, I consider that to be sophistry. 2) This person is impossibly naive about society, the world and the state of current affairs. In this case they should be listening more and speaking less. At any rate, thank you for your comments and your faith in my abilities. I genuinely appreciate your not flaming me, however deserved, and expressing your concern calmly instead. However, although rash and inarticulate, stating my feelings the way I did communicates an emotional punch that my outline above doesn't. And although I do sometimes delete hastily-written comments, in this case I will leave my name it. I don't care much for people who can't see the forest for the trees on this issue. Arguing the semantics of racial epithets is, frankly, bullshit.
- glesica 14y agoI have a huge problem with people submitting bug reports because it needlessly creates the perception that the software is buggy. Pointing out racism has nothing to do with "stirring racial divides". This appears to be a reasonably sophisticated analysis, the methodology was clearly explained. It certainly, at least, appears they didn't just make up a bunch of numbers. If you disagree, then find data and make your case.
- cobrausn 14y agoHe did make his case - 395 racist tweets out of 120 million voters is practically background noise. You should expect all manner of extreme behavior on a sample size that large.
- Anechoic 14y agoAgain, that 395 number is not the total number of tweets, it's the number of tweets that included geolocation data. That 395 was likely a subset of the total number of racist tweets.
- cobrausn 14y agoAnd if it were 1,000? 5,000? 25,000? You're still talking epsilon-level percentages here.
- jdunck 14y agoIn some previous twitter work, I've seen geo-located tweets at about 2-3% of all tweets (assuming no bias), so charitably 19750 racist tweets here. Which is to say, I agree with you.
- mistercow 14y ago"Epsilon-level percentages" isn't really a useful concept. As a sample size grows, phenomena become significant at smaller percentages. The set of all tweets is gigantic, so we can still make significant observations based on a "small" subset. The point of this article is not to say "look at how many racists there are on Twitter." The point is to say "Let's look at the racist people on Twitter. What is the geographical distribution?" 395 geotagged tweets is absolutely enough to start making some interesting observations. Those observations can only be about relatively broad regions at that sample size, but they are interesting nonetheless.
- jfaucett 14y agoI completely agree, these people are idiots. Why waste time trying doing something so non-constructive to society?
- no_more_death 14y agoOne thing to take into account: A lot of racists probably are technologically backward and don't use Twitter. Another thing: I'm sure that a lot of racist tweets were NOT detected by their methodology. Still, it's true that racism is mostly in the past, particularly in conservative circles. I have met a couple of older people who were racist. They wouldn't use the n-word, but they would speak in somewhat stiff terms of "electing someone who is Anglo-Saxon" or "electing someone who is like us." The couple I mean were previously members of the John Byrd society, so they were from THAT stream of people. I would observe the widespread acclaim that Herman Cain received from conservative media as a good indication that racism is a thing of the past for conservatives. Also when you consider that Obama's party, the Democratic Party, was once a southern phenomenon with a vocal racist branch that even split out a "Dixiecrat" party, it's pretty clear we've come a long way.
- josephlord 14y ago"Still, it's true that racism is mostly in the past,..." I hope you are right but that is bold prediction about the future path of humanity.