Dr. Monica Stephens, a professor at Humboldt State University, has created a series of maps that illustrate which areas of the United States are most likely to send tweets with certain hateful words. It’s called Geography of Hate, and here’s how it works:
The data behind this map is based on every geocoded tweet in the United States from June 2012 – April 2013 containing one of the ‘hate words’. This equated to over 150,000 tweets and was drawn from the DOLLY project based at the University of Kentucky. Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing ‘hate words’ as “negative,” this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.
To produce the map all tweets containing each ‘hate word’ were aggregated to the county level and normalized by the total twitter traffic in each county.
The heat map we’ve highlighted above tracks “chink” tweets. Users are able to zoom in, where they’ll discover, among other things, that a disproportionate number of “chink” tweets originate from central Virginia. What’s up with that?
Play around and see if you find any other trends.
(Geography of Hate, h/t 8Asians)
so if you actually take a look at the map, you see they are dealing with users in the SINGLE digits and Tweets in the SINGLE digits … zooming out it looks like the entire Midwest/South is full of hate. But zooming in reveals that most people are not screaming out nigger or chink or fag on twitter and the few that are are disproportionately red. Gotta make those raw numbers available to cool down the heat.
What about out-of-context tweets, for example people with a chink in their armor, or people chinking glasses of wine? What if African Americans themselves use the N word in an exercise of appropriation?
They went over each tweet to classify them and rule out the kinds of exceptions you mention.
How many tweets in America had ‘laowai’… ha ha
Sascha makes a very good and interesting point. A lot of these tweets are coming from a few isolated people in situation areas. However, that doesn’t mean that there are only a few people that feel this way there.
Just isolating down on specific terms being used in tweets, in my home state, my home town is literally the epicenter of hate tweets using the N word in racist tweets, and one of two with the highest occurrence locations for use of the Q word in homophobic tweets. In total, my hometown has a population of under 10,000 people, and it is the largest town in the 4 counties it sits in the corner of. So, even though the survey isolates the tweets down to the county level, it is very clear where these tweets are coming from because my hometown is not a county seat for any of the 4 counties it sits in.
What I think this speaks to is the unfortunate reality that in my hometown it is socially acceptable to be racist and homophobic, and that the bulk of the population is comfortable enough with this kind of behavior that they are doing nothing to stop it. Or even worse, the bulk of the population knows this behavior is wrong, but is unwilling or too scared to take action to stop it.
Unfortunately, it appears this is a silence is acceptance situation. There are a few people that are confident enough to tweet out right racist and homophobic comments, but they build this confidence from being around people that are just as racist and homophobic as they are, and are not confident enough to say these things themselves.
I think what this map shows us is that even though there are few people that have the out right confidence to be blatantly honest about their racism and homophobia, there are clearly bastions of population where racism and homophobia is so common, socially acceptable, or not stopped that there are individuals that feel comfortable enough to speak their honest feelings.
We as a nation need to work harder to ensure that we educate our population as a whole well enough to understand that racism and homophobia is wrong. Moreover, we need to help the large parts of our population that know racism and homophobia is wrong the confidence to stand up and call out the racists and homophobes.
Alternatively, just not give a fuck about america and stay out of it entirely. Fucked up on so many levels it’s really just not worth the time to care anymore.
Pls, pls stop caring already.
wow america should love to use “nigger” even though they are scare to dead to even say it in real life or in tv. “n word” the fuck is that..LMAO
So how many used the word “chink” positively? Like: “I like chinks!” or “Chinks are great!”
Anyway, who uses the word “chink” anyway? Most people refer to Chinese as either “Chinese” or “F*cking Chinese!” as the situation demands…