Seeing red over map of hatred- map of hate tweets

[appleannie1]

The red stains spread out across the maps of the US like bruises or the ink blots of a Rorschach test. They are maps of hate speech, as gathered via Twitter and analysed and plotted by a team of researchers led by the Humboldt University geography professor Monica Stephens.
During the 2012 campaign, Dr Stephens noted the surge of racist tweets made about President Barack Obama, and decided to plot those that were sent with a geocode - an electronic pinpoint - to see if some areas appeared to be more racist than others.
In that early project she discovered that two of the hotspots were Mississippi and Alabama, states that voted strongly against the president and have a history of poor race relations.
Intrigued, she and a group of students decided to map hatred across America using the same method - plotting the location of tweets made with derogatory use of terms such as ''nigger'' and ''fag''.


Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/seeing-red-over-map-of-hatred-20130810-2rork.html#ixzz2bggl1oYM

It is really eyeopening. There more hot spots than one would think there are. The ability to remain anonymous seems to get people to let their guard down and show what they really are.

[ZombieHorde]

1. Montana looks better than I would have guessed.

We have an Aryan Nations compound in our state.

[appleannie1]

2. I live in rural PA. We have a few of those type groups in this state.

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map

[TudorGothicSerpent]

3. Fascinating

This is a really interesting and really disturbing map, on several different levels. The most disturbing aspect, though, is how broadly some of the word usages are really spread out. There are definitely areas with more or less hate, but with the exception of a few terms, the map pretty much looks like a picture of U.S. city lights at night. You find at least moderate levels in any heavily populated area, which seems deeply wrong.

Racism seems to be pretty deep seated in humanity. It's probably going to be very hard to deal with in the long-term, honestly, even if we make it socially unacceptable. Social controls can keep it out of the public eye, but as this reveals, it's still going to be there. If people feel that they can only reveal it behind a perception of anonymity, though, maybe that says good things about our society. At least we as a society from upon the sorts of public expressions of explicit racism that were widespread a few decades ago. We might be able to move past this and teach children to recognize racist tendencies as destructive rather than something to be accepted.

[TJ-Tretman]

4. I saw something like that

I saw a map that showed the concentration of racist tweets after Obama got reelected. Sorry to say Alabama and Mississippi (my state) got the highest concentrations.

[heaven05]

5. a racist aryan minority

runs our government, that's all I see. Their noise is, so far, louder than ours. That's all I hear. And this society at large is allowing this takeover. Don't get me wrong, we are here in resistance.

[Stargleamer]

6. a lack of self-understanding could be involved in such expressions

Link to tweet