Humboldt State University professor Monica Stephens and her undergraduate students just released an interactive map showing where hate speech pops up on Twitter around the U.S.
Students searched a year’s worth of geocoded tweets — more than 150,000 — that contained certain “hate words” and individually ranked them positive, negative or neutral, depending on context. Counties with more negative comments than the national average were marked on the map with a color gradient — pale blue for fewer tweets to bright red for higher concentrations.
“We’re really looking at these ways that the Internet relates to material space, how data online reflects material conditions,” Stephens said. “There have been a lot of conversations about the impacts of online bullying and the use of these words on the Internet to target specific groups.”
The British newspaper The Guardian, the io9 Gawker blog and other news outlets have picked up the map. Stephens and her students previously made a map tracking tweets directing racial slurs at President Obama following the 2012 presidential election.
Using her map, people can see the prevalence tweets by homophobic, racist or ableist (derogatory against the disabled) language, and select individual hate words to see where they’re concentrated around the U.S. The data is proportional based on the amount of Twitter activity for each county.
The map isn’t a complete reflection of hate language on Twitter. Geolocated tweets, an account option that can be turned on or off, represent a small portion of Twitter users — mostly smart phone users.
The next phase of the project, Stephens said, is viewing the data against other county demographics like education and unemployment.
Read more at Floating Sheep, a collaboration between Stephens and professors from Oxford, the University of Kentucky and Clark University.
This article appears in Summer of Fun 2013.
The rusty bible belt.
Is it not possible that areas like Utah and Nebraska simply have far fewer twitter users than some of the areas showing the most hate?
I’m really not surprised by this. I’m from the bible belt. The KKK is still rampant there and high-school was hell for me because I dated a black guy. Parents still actively teach their children to hate anyone non-white and religious groups there can get very extreme with the hatred protests. I’m sure further studies are needed but this is an awesome start. Thanks for your hard work!
Shari
“totaled by county and then normalized by comparing that to the county’s total tweets, enabling the Floating Sheep geographers to identify places with “disproportionately high amounts” of hateful tweets.” from the Atlantic article at http://goo.gl/t8Com
If we know the demographics of twitter, that would definitely tip us off to who is using it as means of communicating hate speech. We do need to account for generational use of internet technology. We are essentially looking mainly at “youth and hate.”
Even if Utah’s success is based around fewer people on Twitter. That’s still fewer people making their hateful opinions public and accessible. So. That’s sort of a moot point.