Stats Pr0n of the Day: U.S. Map of Hate Speech on Twitter
Since June 2012, Dr. Monica Stevens of Humboldt State University in California has been mapping more than 150,000 geotagged tweets that contain homophobic, racist or abliest language. The result is the Geography of Hate, an interactive map of the U.S. which reveals the hotspots of “hate tweets” across the country. A deeper analysis of the project is available at Floating Sheep.
It’s really interesting to see that the hateful messages aren’t divided into North and South, but left and right!  And the more hateful side is….. right wingers! Somehow I’m not surprised at all.
Actually it seems like it mostly just follows population density and urbanization, AKA the frequency of teenagers and young adults who know what twitter is and use it frequently to say dumb shit.
So this is basically just a recoloured population density map, marking how many people are where. And surprise surprise, more people means more racists.
your location has nothing to do with racism and its frequency. I’d hope this would do well to be known by any enlightened, white 20 somethings who live out west.
That is a point, however, it doesn’t mean that the map is inaccurate.  It measures how often hate speech is made in each location.  If you are in an area with higher population, you’re likely to hear it more often. But look at the most populated cities like NYC and Boston and compare the relatively low occurrence of hate speech there, compared to the more sparsely populated midwest.  It’s not an exact indicator.
As someone who lives in one of the more bigoted states on the south east, went to college in the Bible Belt, and has also lived in more liberal areas (like the Bay Area of  CA and various European countries) I can attest to the fact that you hear a lot more hate speech around those “red” states.  And it has little to do with population density(the most bigoted places I’ve been were small town, sprawling country areas) and more to do with lack of education and a culture, religion, and media that reinforces paranoia, bigoted stereotypes and hatefulness.
I also read a response to this map that pointed out that racism is often expressed in different ways in different regions. There are racist people everywhere, but racism in, say, New Hampshire is probably differently expressed than it is in Texas.
