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.
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.
Which is to say, I agree with you.
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.
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.
Regarding your #4: just shut up.
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.
The problem with racism is not that it targets people of color. It's that it targets them in order to treat them bad. The KKK wouldn't be any better if they targeted people blindly. So, I take offense with your behavior here: being rude to everybody and anybody is just as bad as being racist in a tweet.
The arguments put forth in the parent comments seem perfectly valid. The sample is in the region of statistical noise, and as such gives very little information about the matter.
Also, I believe that Twitter as a sampling space is flawed. E.g places like Mississippi and Alabama might have far more rampant racism than California, but be underrepresented in the category of "people with tweeter accounts" because of poverty rates.
The formula for this location quotient is
(# of Hate Tweets in State / # of Hate Tweets in USA)
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(# of ALL Tweets in State / # of ALL Tweets in USA)No, it's not racist. It's just ignorant. Everyone knows George Bush (along with all humans) is not a monkey, but an ape. Specifically an African ape. Knowing this makes racism a pretty humorous topic.
The divides exist, pointing that out doesn't make things worse and helps people be more aware of racism in society.
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.
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.
I hope you are right but that is bold prediction about the future path of humanity.
It's 395 geocoded tweets, not 395 tweets total across Twitter.