The map of hate...pretty surprising results!

[davester]

I must say that this is totally unexpected. This is a map of tweets using specific words uses against minorities, gays and disabled people. I expected more variation regarding prejudice against different groups and I'm surprised regarding the east-west divide versus expected deep south racism. This is the map of homophobic words.


If you want to check out the different words here is a link to the interactive map:

http://users.humboldt.edu/mstephens/hate/hate_map.html#

[mattkime]

canada and mexico are hate free

[freeradical]

mattkime wrote:
canada and mexico are hate free

Or possibly twitter free

[rgG]

As I have been saying for a long while, it isn't just the south that has a problem with racism.
I guess we now have some small empirical evidence that I was right.

[gabester]

I am virtually certain there is some methodological failure on this map. I can't quite put my finger on it...

[Chakravartin]

Once again, imbeciles confuse Internet-access and racism.

This is a map of broadband-access in the U.S.A.

Look familiar?



Congratulations! You've successfully mapped Twitter-usage in the USA.

[mattkime]

freeradical wrote:
[quote=mattkime]
canada and mexico are hate free

Or possibly twitter free
even better!

[Chakravartin]

Here, let me put it another way:

[davester]

Chakravartin wrote:
Once again, imbeciles confuse Internet-access and racism.

This is a map of broadband-access in the U.S.A.

Look familiar?



Congratulations! You've successfully mapped Twitter-usage in the USA.

WRONG! Before jumping to conclusions, perhaps you should have clicked the link and looked at the methodology. The data were normalized for twitter usage level down to the county level.

To produce the map all tweets containing each 'hate word' were aggregated to the county level and normalized by the total twitter traffic in each county. Counties were reduced to their centroids and assigned a weight derived from this normalization process. This was used to generate a heat map that demonstrates the variability in the frequency of hateful tweets relative to all tweets over space. Where there is a larger proportion of negative tweets referencing a particular 'hate word' the region appears red on the map, where the proportion is moderate, the word was used less (although still more than the national average) and appears a pale blue on the map. Areas without shading indicate places that have a lower proportion of negative tweets relative to the national average.

[Chakravartin]

davester wrote:
WRONG! Before jumping to conclusions, perhaps you should have clicked the link and looked at the methodology.

Re-read it.

Not one word about normalizing for INTERNET ACCESS.

All that they are saying is that counties with small populations of "hate-tweeters" are left off the map. So, the dark spaces correspond to a paucity of tweets. And that makes perfect sense since there's also a paucity of Internet access in those same places.

'Can't tweet when you can't get online.

Monica Stephens has been doing this with at least one class every year for the last several years. Every time she makes one of these population maps and claims to have discovered some deeper meaning, she and her school get lots of free publicity. But regardless of what her class is studying, every year the map looks almost exactly the same.

...Which may be the subtle point of it.