Geography of Hate: The Twitter Hate Map

[Jamaal510]

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Interactive map link: http://users.humboldt.edu/mstephens/hate/hate_map.html

Article link: http://www.geekosystem.com/geography-of-hate-map/

In case you needed a dose of depressing news today, here’s some for you: Research site Floating Sheep’s built a map of homophobia, racism, and ableism across the United States in the form of geotagged tweets. It’s about as horrifying as you’d expect, and this doesn’t even include accidental or comedic references to any of this stuff. This map is only straight-up intentional instances of hate.

This all stems back to an earlier Floating Sheep project where they connected President Obama with racial slurs, but this time they’ve really outdone themselves. How do they know this data is only representative of intentional hate? They had a group of Humboldt State University students sort through them all and discard any that weren’t considered derogatory. Floating Sheep’s detailed all their methodology here, and it’s a fascinating and recommended read.

The map itself gets pretty granular, letting you highlight only certain specific slurs or kinds of discrimination. It goes from “some hate” to “most hate” with light blue being the former and bright red being the latter. The gray everywhere else just means there wasn’t any geotagged tweets for whatever specific discrimination is currently being presented.

This obviously isn’t representative of all discrimination on Twitter since not every tweet gets geotagged, but it’s illuminating nonetheless.

[Mosby]

1. arizona looks pretty good

Lots better than those haters in NM, lol.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

2. or they don't know how to tweet... n/t

[former9thward]

11. Your reply would qualify as a hate tweet.

Congratulations.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

18. nah... none of the target words were used

so that would have not passed the filter. i'll try harder next time...

sP

[boston bean]

3. The map would be entirely red if they had included hate against women.

What a very disturbing map.

[Comrade Grumpy]

5. "What a very disturbing map" you've created in your imagination.

[pintobean]

6. What a disturbing comment.

[zappaman]

7. Wow.

Really?
Who thinks like that?

[galileoreloaded]

8. it staggers me how blatant statements of bias like this just get a pass in a progressive space

and the best i can guess is that there is some type of intrinsic fear that says disagreeing with bigoted statements like this somehow equate to tacit or implicit approval of violence against women.

but the reality is that we, as PEOPLE, can work to curb violent crimes against PEOPLE in ways that don't require this us vs. them attitude that the same 4 or 5 posters here are constantly, over, and over, and over try to frame as normal behavior.

but, in fairness, i also have to remember that the vast majority of people don't think and act this way and can be accountable to their statements and thank goodness that statements like this only occur in a narrow lens of participants both here and in greater society.

but its NOT ok to just let this garbage just slide on by just because you are fearful of being judged for not buying into hyperbole.

ugh.

[Warren DeMontague]

17. It would?

How to explain, then, the vast discrepancies between red and blue states with regards to, for instance, anti-choice legislation?

[A Little Weird]

19. I was reading some comments by the researcher

She said they did not include sexist tweets due to the sheer volume - there were well over 5 million tweets with the word "bitch" for example. Not all of that would be negative comment presumably but it would take so much money to go through the tweets that they decided it wasn't affordable for their project.

[Comrade Grumpy]

4. It looks like the only places where there isn't any hate is where there aren't any people.

Funny, that.

[Mosby]

10. population of the phx metro area is over 4 million

That's double the entire population of New Mexico.

And look where the red is, not phoenix or AZ.

[postulater]

9. Lotsa places where nobody twits. nt

[Nevernose]

12. Apparently Las Vegas is the most egalitarian city of 2+ million people in the nation

Or there's something terribly wrong with the methodology here. Or maybe the "Mississippi of the West" has developed some kind of miracle racism cure.

On edit: I missed the total lack of racism in LA, too, or that Lake Havasu apparently has a problem with the Klan.

[Mosby]

14. LV and Phx metro. nt

[Nevernose]

15. Apparently Lake Havasu is a hotbed of racism?

And what appears to be either Bishop, CA, or Death Valley.

[Mosby]

16. bullhead city az is an area with a lot of white supremists

Maybe the problem is moving south.

[Warren DeMontague]

13. Like the song says

"Try To Tell Us Something We Don't Know"

[A Little Weird]

20. Methodology

They aggregated the tweets by county and then normalized by total number of tweets to come up with their density. I can sort of see why they would do this, but it means that in an area where you don't have that many twitter users, you could get really skewed results. Twitter use tends to be higher in urban areas and is embraced more by younger people. So a place like L.A. might have a lot of racist tweets but it will probably be low as a percent of total tweets. But Podunk, USA may have only a handful of total tweets so just one racist could turn it into a "hotspot".

Anyway, I love looking at maps and this one is interesting but I guess I need to think about it some more. It may make perfect sense if I look at it when I'm not tired.