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.
I have a huge problem with people submitting bug reports because it needlessly creates the perception that the software is buggy.
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.
He did make his case - 395 racist tweets out of 120 million voters is practically background noise. You should expect all manner of extreme behavior on a sample size that large.
Again, that 395 number is not the total number of tweets, it's the number of tweets that included geolocation data. That 395 was likely a subset of the total number of racist tweets.
"Epsilon-level percentages" isn't really a useful concept. As a sample size grows, phenomena become significant at smaller percentages. The set of all tweets is gigantic, so we can still make significant observations based on a "small" subset.
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.
The sample was from a subset (geolocated tweets) and involved only a very specific set of keywords. In other words, this was not an exercise to see how many racist tweets there are. It was an exercise to see where the racist tweets generally come from. All that was needed here was a relatively small random sample. So the analysis, at least in terms of the sample size itself, is almost certainly valid. You may have misunderstood the point of the post...
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.
The reason the quote in 3) makes no sense is that it's wrong. :) The article gives a correct explanation in a footnote:
The formula for this location quotient is
(# of Hate Tweets in State / # of Hate Tweets in USA)
------------------------------------------------------------
(# of ALL Tweets in State / # of ALL Tweets in USA)
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.
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.
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.
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, but this map does virtually nothing to shed illumination on the matter. I think everyone here can figure out why the methodology and sampling size would lead to inaccurate results...and at the same time, I think everyone would also agree that this sampling would vastly undercount the actual amount of racism among our citizenry (as frequent Twitter users have a much different demographic than the voting demographic).
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.
One thing to take into account: A lot of racists probably are technologically backward and don't use Twitter.
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'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.
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'?
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."
>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.
Semantic wanking. If a conversation about Free Software was filled with discussion of Visual Studio Express, it would be just as silly as this.
"Hate Speech" was a term cooked up to bundle homophobic, racist, and anti-religious speech together. It means whatever the people who came up with it and publicized it want it to mean, and pretending that one doesn't know in order to have a strawman debate for you is a waste of everyone's time.
(Not that I don't find the term distasteful. I find the idea of criminalizing both internal states and speech pretty vile.)
Seriously, has anyone made the argument that a death threat is ok?
Arguments made by omission can be just as powerful as those made by commission.
This is the typical response of "look the other side does it to!".
That's entirely my point. That "typical response" is not logically unfounded. It's a rationale for behavior based upon the correct perception of hypocrisy.
This is why intellectual integrity is IMPORTANT. Intellectual integrity eliminates such justifications. Hypocritical approaches to racism will prevent us from ever really putting it in a context that will make it unarguably immoral.
You're confusing an excuse your mom didn't like with an actual rationale. A rationale is a reason for someone to do something. It's empirically the reason given for this kind of behavior in many situations.
We may not like that reason or think it's fundamentally the most mature way to behave - but it's still a reason. If you're saying it's illogical, it's not, game theory says that this kind of self-protective behavior is very logical when competing with other actors that are also being self-protective.
If you're not looking at this through our team vs. their team glasses, you might notice that the study didn't discover that racism was deplorable. It makes speculations about where racists among the twitter demographic in the US live, by taking advantage of an event which was bound to bring them out in force.
Caring about threats to Romney's life doesn't even make sense in that context. Caring about threats to Obama's life doesn't even make sense in that context, unless they called him a monkey nigger while doing it.
Please stop dividing the world into things that are for or against your football team.
>Raising the alarm about one type of racism while turning a blind eye to other types of irrational hate smacks of hypocrisy.
Are you seriously trying to say that paying attention to anti-black discrimination as a subject separate from anti-Kurd discrimination is hypocritical? I bet you wouldn't be saying that if the OP was about the distribution of anti-Kurd tweets.
Agreed. It reminds me a bit of the fallacy of criminalizing "hate speech", which you are seeing in Europe lately. It actually gives the bigots a bit of a legitimate grievance, in that their freedom of speech is being eroded. Besides, personally, if someone is eager to inform me about what an idiot they are, I see no advantage in legally preventing them. I think the cult of political correctness has actually been quite damaging to race relations.
What about the people that voted for Obama—just because he's black? Isn't that racist too? What about the people who voted for Obama out of fear of being labeled racist? Isn't that blackmail?
I've no idea how widespread those cases are, but I do wonder.
What about the people who voted for Romney because he is white? What kind of question is that even?
Suddenly when it's a black guy THAT'S the issue. How brain dead.
Wanting your kid to have positive black role models is not racist, no. That's a not very sophisticated but very valid and certainly not racist reason for voting for Obama that's entirely based on race.
What about the people who voted for Romney because he is white?
Those people are also racists, and frequently called racists. The double standard is issue here. White guy votes for a white guy because he's white means he's a racists. Black guy votes for a black guy because he's black means he's supporting change.
Worse yet, is that since I think Obama has done a horrible job and wouldn't vote for him, his supporters call me a racist. Sad state of affairs really.
I said it yesterday and I will say it again today: If you insist on playing semantic games and defining racism so weirdly I will happily admit to loving being racist in that way.
You mistake is to assume symmetry where there is none.
Wanting your kid to have positive black role models is not racist, no.
Voting for or against someone because of the color of his skin is racist by definition. You don't get to choose which color.
I imagine that you'd want to choose some particular definition of racism that meets your semantic needs, but that's not how this whole "logical use of language" thing works.
Not teaching your kid that character and political philosophy matter more than the color of a candidate's skin is bad parenting.
If I offended you, I apologize for that. I'm not trying to offend or label anyone racist, I'm trying to point out the double standard. Technically I'm baiting the discussion by begging the question:
If a white man votes for a white man because he is white, he is racist.
If a black man votes for a black man because he is black, he is participating in black pride.
Wait, what?!
> Suddenly when it's a black guy THAT'S the issue. How brain dead.
Nope, the issue is that the same standard isn't applied to BOTH groups. The same issue applies to the straight/gay debate: why is it discrimination when someone straight is in a straight-pride parade, but not a gay person in a gay-pride parade?
> Wanting your kid to have positive black role models is not racist, no. That's a not very sophisticated but very valid and certainly not racist reason for voting for Obama that's entirely based on race.
I'm not going to go into why I think Obama is a bad role model. I'm white, but I have people I consider as role models...
My black role models are:
1. A police officer in Baltimore, whom I call my uncle and has been there for me more than my biological uncles.
2. A parole officer in Baltimore for juvenile delinquents. He's in his job just to give kids a chance to work out their problems, and to change from the gang/criminal mentality they've had.
3. And a woman who, as a single mother, raised two daughters and sent them to college by hard work and sheer economy. And now she suffers greatly from diabetes and arthritis but still refuses to give up. She encourages ME every time I see her.
I've seen the lives of these people and respect them greatly. From what I've seen of Obama he doesn't even measure up. If he did, I could have considered voting for him.
So please, don't assume that I'm calling you names or wanting to attack you because you might've voted for Obama because he's black. I just want you to consider: could you have been racist? And maybe you'll think of me next time I vote for a white person, and think better of me than "he's racist".
In the former case, yes that's racist but there were probably fewer of them this election than the last. Also, there were probably fewer of them than voted against him because he's black.
WRT the latter, you don't have to reveal who you voted for so I doubt many did so out of fear (except maybe at those polling stations in Philly manned by the Black Panthers.) Peer pressure is a problem in elections, but it works in both directions.
What is sad as well is that that epithet is often aimed at Republican or right-leaning politicians of colour such as Condie Rice, Herman Cain, Colin Powell etc.
In 2000 Gore won 42% of the white vote and 90% of the black vote. In 2012, Obama won 39% of the white vote and 93% of the black vote.
So at most, Obama got an extra 3% of the black vote on account of his race, and lost at most 3% of the white vote. So on the face of it, a wash. Of course, the white electorate is over five times larger than the black electorate, so that's really -2.2%, +0.4%.
Even if Obama had performed at Bill Clinton's historically low 83% of the black vote, his popular vote total would have been only 1.3% lower. This may have been enough to make him lose the popular vote, but it would not have been enough to make him lose the electoral college (Mitt Romney would have needed to win the popular vote by 3% to have won the electoral college).
It's a little elevated but not much, I would guess any "reverse racism" going on is probably proportional or lesser than the people who didn't vote for Obama because he was black. Recall that black voters historically align with the Democrats in the 80-90% range anyways:
Even though the percent might not be much higher, it's really about turnout, not percent won. Twice as many blacks showed up to the polls for Obama than for Clinton. Obama was a "movement" candidate in the black community.
However, I'm sympathetic to your argument - I think blacks turning out for Obama was more akin to Irish Catholics showing up for Kennedy, rather than whites showing up for George Wallace - more of a pride thing, and a symbolic triumph over past discrimination, etc.
I'm reluctant to link to them because they were all Drudge Report style aggregators of the type that are frowned upon by HN. Anyone curious can just Google "Romney win riots" and see for themselves. We're talking hundreds or thousands of tweets of this nature.
To be honest, I'm not really bothered by either because it really just amounts to verbal graffiti. I don't think any of those tweeting were future black panther revolutionaries, any more than I think the ones featured in this post were future James Earl Rays. They're all just lacking empathy, common sense, and inhibition on Twitter.
Bah, I read news from as many sources as I can. I find that when people turn up their noses at FoxNews, the Drudge Report, Huffpo, or Salon just because of the source - it's usually because they're insecure about their fragile belief system... scared that they might read something that's true which will force them to re-think their positions.
Agreed, but HN has set a pretty high standard for sourcing, much to its credit. I wouldn't feel bad about posting ideological material from the WSJ, National Review, or NYT, but I would never post Drudge, HuffPo, Breitbart, Slate, etc. to HN, even though I check them out regularly just to get the temperature of the national discourse, and get a heads up on those occasional outlier stories that they're ahead of the curve on.
Besides, the foaming at the mouth, politics as bloodsport commentary can be a kind of entertaining guilty pleasure, kind of like outsider art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art
Mostly agree, in the same way that HuffPo isn't, but they provided direct links to the tweets, and with a little searching on twitter.com, it wasn't hard to find tons of tweets in the same vein.
I think that's exactly the point: why limit the analysis to racist speech (when the idiocy hurled on one side will be racist) and not equally bad - or worse - speech (when that other type of speech is on the other side).
It's sort of like tracking all the cases of food poisoning from pizza and ignoring the food poisoning from fish.
"Hey, I've got data that says that people get poisoned from other foods too."
Is that racism such as calling a person a monkey or a n*er, or is that violent speech absent of racial slurs? One could make a violent statement, a racist statement and a violent, racist statement.
The difference between threats and hate speech is that hate speech is intended to oppress an already marginalized group, as a group. That is, there are two criminal acts (1) threatening the individual (2) oppressing the group, happening as a result of one act of speech. This justifies a special treatment for it in law, differing from mere threats.
With a sample size of 395, given the intensity of feeling around general elections, all this really does is show that America is staggeringly not racist.
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.
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.
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 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.
“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.”
I think my favourite comment I heard someone say to describe the Republicans demographics problem is when watching Romney's camp during election night:
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.
I's difficult to say from context whether that was meant in a racist manner. From a purely factual perspective it is true that GOP votes are older, whiter and male.
Think about it. If you heard "The problem with Democrats is young minority women" what would that mean to you? Right now, nothing, but if you (assuming you are male) were unable to get a prostate exam without spending $18209389012830 whereas it was, and always was, easy for women to get breast exams for free under their insurance, this statement would mean something.
Lets examine that statement: "the problem with Republicans is old white guys."
The problem: winning national elections.
Republicans: the subject.
Old white guys: the primary supporting demographic of the GOP.
This is not a racist statement because it makes no claims to racial superiority. It is simply observing demographic shifts in the population. So long as the GOP focuses almost exclusively on that demographic they will continue to lose elections.
>Talk about your sexist, racist , ageist comments!
That really depends on the definitions of those terms. In a pedantic "by the dictionary" sense, yes, those comments are racist, sexist and ageist. But not in a way that can be meaningfully compared to the usual referents of those terms.
You see, these concepts are tied up with the idea of privilege[1]. "Old white guys in the GOP" draws a boundary around a cluster of one of the most privileged groups in the entire world. There are important practical differences between prejudiced and generalized language directed at oppressed groups, and prejudiced and generalized language directed at a group in power.
When we hear someone say "old white guys are the problem with the GOP", we know that we're not talking about the unprivileged outliers in that group. We are talking specifically about one of the most privileged groups in America, and crucially, the problem we are talking about is directly tied to their privilege. The implied claim is not that they're sucking up public resources, or "taking our jobs", etc. It's that they have power and that their privilege prevents them from understanding many of the issues that are important to unprivileged groups like women and minorities. In short, the problem that "old white guys" are accused of causing is something that they have the ability to change.
Now don't get me wrong: this kind of prejudice is not harmless. It still attaches a stigma to those who fall within the extension of the term, but not the intension. But the harm it does cannot be seriously compared to the harm done by prejudice against unprivileged groups.
>Substituting the words "Democratic" and "young" and "of color" sounds pretty silly.
And now we can see what the difference is. "Young black men" draws a boundary around a cluster of one of the least privileged groups in America. Even though you only substituted apparently parallel terms in the sentence, the meaning of the sentence is drastically different. Once you take into consideration the societal context, you can see that "the problem with the Democrats is young black guys" isn't the other side of the coin. The "old white guys" statement is about a group wielding power while blinded by privilege. The "young black guys" statement is about... what? It can't be about power and privilege because power and privilege are outlier properties in that group. So whatever problem is, it's probably not something that the people in question have much control over.
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.
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.
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.
After reviewing their list of "Top 10 Floating Sheep Maps" that appears in the sidebar, it's a reasonable assumption that this is a site with a certain world view. The readers who agree with that world view (say, /r/politics) won't particularly care about the statistical sample size as long as the results reinforce their beliefs.
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.
From wiki: "Racism is usually defined as views, practices and actions reflecting the belief that humanity is divided into distinct biological groups called races and that members of a certain race share certain attributes which make that group as a whole less desirable, more desirable, inferior or superior"
A frustrated exclamation of a horribly degrading word to express their anger != A view that African Americans are inferior.
It certainly doesn't show class and I'd bet you'd surely find a higher proportion of racists among those who tweeted that word, but calling them all racists? Wrong.
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.
it was a very biased 'study'. from the article, it appears that this person specifically targeted people that were anti-Obama, forgetting entirely all the racists tweets that threatened riot and death if Romney won.
The n-word is not necessarily racist, if used in the right context. But given the context of most of these tweets it is absolutely used in racist tones, ie. "niggers in the whitehouse!"
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.
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.
