Friday, November 9, 2012
Stupid / Internetz Georgia ranked third among racist post-election tweets, study says
Posted by Max Blau @maxblau on Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 2:18 PM
Throughout the 2012 election season, social media has helped people to engage in the compilation of Mitt Romney's female-themed Trapper Keepers™ political discourse surrounding election races more than ever before.
But there's also a downside to discussing politics through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. As a recent Jezebel post documented, an abundance of hate messages followed the re-election of President Barack Obama.
Floatingsheep, which analyzes user-generated geocoded data, yesterday took a hard look at racist election tweets. After aggregating tweets surrounding the presidential race, the site's authors examined the data on a state-by-state basis, seeing how the racist posts compared to the overall number of messages during that same period.
What did they find? They saw that Southern states had a high amount of racist tweeters.
That includes Georgia, which ranked third just behind Alabama and Mississppi.
You can see their findings in this nifty interactive map they created. They've also posted their complete state-level data here. In addition, they noted that:
* Mississippi and Alabama have the highest LQ measures with scores of 7.4 and 8.1, respectively.
* Other southern states (Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee) surrounding these two core states also have very high LQ scores and form a fairly distinctive cluster in the southeast.
* The prevalence of post-election racist tweets is not strictly a southern phenomenon as North Dakota (3.5), Utah (3.5) and Missouri (3) have very high LQs. Other states such as West Virginia, Oregon and Minnesota don't score as high but have a relatively higher number of hate tweets than their overall twitter usage would suggest.
* The Northeast and West coast (with the exception of Oregon) have a relatively lower number of hate tweets.
* States shaded in grey had no geocoded hate tweets within our database. Many of these states (Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and South Dakota) have relatively low levels of Twitter use as well. Rhode Island has much higher numbers of geocoded tweets but had no hate tweets that we could identify.
It's hard to say exactly where these tweets were sent from. Floatingsheep's data includes latitude and longitude but doesn't break down the tweets according to city — although you'll notice a good number of them are in the metro Atlanta area. Nevertheless, it's troubling to see that the Georgia leads the way in social media racism.
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