
Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election - nreece
http://www.floatingsheep.org/2012/11/mapping-racist-tweets-in-response-to.html
======
nhebb
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.

~~~
Claudus
I have the exact same problem, I'm sure that there are many racists in our
country, but this graphic is pretty garbage.

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.

~~~
jessedhillon
Why do you respond when you can't even be bothered to read TFA? The criteria
used to find the tweets was very clearly described in footnote 1.

Regarding your #4: just shut up.

~~~
1123581321
Would you please edit your #4 response to be more informative and thoughtful,
or remove it? It is currently incendiary and not helpful, and as someone who
has exchanged emails with you privately in the past (financial industry
software opportunities) I know you can write something better here.

~~~
jessedhillon
Yeah, it's not the most professional way to put things. The question itself
is, frankly, ridiculous -- I only see two ways to parse it:

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.

------
crusso
Racism is deplorable, but weren't the threats to kill Romney if he won the
election equally deplorable?

[http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-supporters-on-
twitter-...](http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-supporters-on-twitter-
issue-threats-to-kill-mitt-romney-on-eve-of-election)

What is any less hateful about them?

    
    
       "I'll personally f*****g kill Romney if he try's some dumb nazi s**t f**k that (sic),"
    

I looked through floatingsheep's other recent blogs and they didn't cover that
one.

The problem I have with the lack of objectivity on racism is that it's
actually counter-productive to solving the problem. Raising the alarm about
one type of racism while turning a blind eye to other types of irrational hate
smacks of hypocrisy.

~~~
chez17
>What is any less hateful about them?

Has anyone suggested otherwise? Seriously, has anyone made the argument that a
death threat is ok?

This is the typical response of "look the other side does it to!". On top of
it, the tweet you linked to has nothing to do with racism, just stupid
partisanship. If you're so concerned about that, write your own blog post.

>The problem I have with the lack of objectivity on racism is that it's
actually counter-productive to solving the problem.

You brought up a tweet that has literally nothing to do with racism, how does
that counteract your claims of 'lack of objectivity'?

~~~
DigitalJack
Nobody calls a death threat "hate speech." That is implicitly suggesting that
the people who use the term "hate speech" don't consider it hateful.

Now if you queried someone directly, they would of course say it's hateful (I
would think). So what that ends up suggesting is the term "hate speech" is
really just a short-hand for racially derogatory statements. AKA racist
comments.

People have decided the term racist and racism are too detached and not
emotionally impactful, so now we have "hate speech" which is more forceful.

It does, unfortunately, seem to imply that somehow threatening someone with
death is less hateful than racism.

Now, the post you were replying to seems to be a reaction to the post which
uses racist tweets and hate tweets interchangably. That apparently stuck in
his craw, so to speak, because there were plenty of other very hateful tweets
going on during this election that had nothing to do with racism, yet they are
excluded from a post discussing "hate tweets."

~~~
rauljara
>People have decided the term racist and racism are too detached and not
emotionally impactful, so now we have "hate speech" which is more forceful.

This isn't why the term hate speech came about. The term hate speech came
about in order to have a word applies not only to racism, but also to sexism,
anti-semitism, homophobic language, etc. It is an umbrella term that refers to
speech that is directed towards people solely based on the (usually immutable)
group to which they belong.

It is not a synonym for hateful speech. Hateful is its own term. E.g. "I going
to kill white people because I hate them so much" == hate speech (and also
hateful). "I'm going to kill that guy because I hate him so much" == hateful
(but not hate speech).

For the record, I come down firmly on the side that both are wrong. But
bringing up one when the conversation was originally about the other tends to
lead to derailment.

------
troels
This could have been interesting, but with a sample size of 395, I'm afraid
the numbers are very unreliable.

~~~
omnisci
If this was a full scientific study, I'd agree. Lets keep in mind that it
isn't, and it's just a reflection of what was actually said. It isn't fair to
draw conclusions from this such as "Alabama is a racist!?!?", but the data do
still say something.

~~~
jedbrown
If data are to "say something", they must do so in a statistically rigorous
sense. I'm not going to speculate on statistical significance in this
particular case.

------
Yoms
As a young "minority", living in the South (Appalachia), I just don't get
this... People in the South have been as kind, welcoming, and intelligent as
people from other areas I've lived/visited.

There are idiots on all sides of the political spectrum, and throughout the
world. Lets call them idiots and stop trying to map their behavior to
demographics. Maybe it's only been my experience, but as a "minority", I can't
wait for all this racism talk to end.

I'm just a human.

------
dogfu6
Well, on the flip side:

I heard multiple "The problem with Republicans is old white guys" comments on
NPR and CNN. From respected "pundits" no less. Talk about your sexist, racist
, ageist comments!

Substituting the words "Democratic" and "young" and "of color" sounds pretty
silly.

I'm all for free speech, though. There will always be a noise component in
political discourse and we Americans have pretty good filters.

~~~
engtech
Were the pundits referring to this interview?

    
    
       “The demographics race we’re losing badly,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
    

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-republican-
convent...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-republican-convention-
emphasizes-diversity-racial-incidents-
intrude/2012/08/29/b9023a52-f1ec-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_story.html)

I think my favourite comment I heard someone say to describe the Republicans
demographics problem is when watching Romney's camp during election night:

"It looks like he's at a family reunion."

~~~
no_more_death
Graham isn't a conservative. He consistently splits from other Republicans.
He's criticizing his own party as a party of "angry white guys" when he says
this. Surely you don't think Graham considers himself on the same side as
"angry white guys"! The article linked does not quote him as an example of
racism, but rather as someone inside the Republican Party who is criticizing
their own demographic.

------
mmuro
Ugh. Being from Alabama, this is just sad. But, I guess unsurprising given the
majority demographic here.

I really hope this election can help move this area of the country forward
because this kind of attitude has never helped the South.

The only thing I can say is that you reference the county-by-county voting and
know that there are lots of blue/purple counties throughout this region.

------
rwhitman
I would say this map only shows areas where its _socially acceptable_ to
openly vocalize racist thoughts in a public forum.

~~~
glesica
This is a really good point IMHO. People say all sorts of things behind closed
doors. But self-censorship in public is almost certainly more common in some
areas of the country than in others.

------
pingou
That's interesting, but thankfully they only had 395 tweets so I wonder if you
can get something really meaningful with a set of data so small. Looks like
there's some correlation with Rommey's voting states though.

~~~
fnayr
Of course it's correlated with the red states; when the person they didn't
want to see win won, they said anything they could to degrade him. Certainly
the n word is the easiest and most offensive word to throw out, but that
doesn't necessarily imply racism. Though I'm not defending their use of that
extremely offensive word, it's highly disingenuous to equate it to racism.

~~~
omnisci
Can of worms = opened. The "n word" does imply racism. I'm not going to write
a book about it, but I'll just put that out there for you to think about.

~~~
mistercow
To paraphrase XKCD, I would say that the word doesn't _imply_ racism, but it
does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively, etc.

------
bryanl
Speaking as a black person, I can see cases where racist tweets would have
been flagged, but weren't really racist. A black person (in some circles)
could say, "Damn, that nigger Obama was reelected!" Is this racist? In this
case, the use of "nigger" could be a term of endearment. It would have still
been flagged during this survey.

------
mjgoins
Many of these accounts are clearly 4chan-style trolls. Although sadly, it's
not the majority.

------
hugh4life
What about mapping tweets by black people saying they would riot if Romney
won?

Your "racism" is too small.

~~~
brandoncor
First of all, how do you filter by "black people" on Twitter? Second, the
authors were probably grabbing all tweets that contained certain racial
epithets. The word "riot" isn't racist.

------
tharris0101
The racism that is charted on this map is way less dangerous than the subtle
racism on display here on HN. And no, I didn't vote for Obama.

------
paulhauggis
How about the tweets before the election talking about riots if Obama wasn't
elected?

~~~
mistercow
How about that is only tangentially related?

