Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election
floatingsheep.org
floatingsheep.org
It's 395 geocoded tweets, not 395 tweets total across Twitter.
The divides exist, pointing that out doesn't make things worse and helps people be more aware of racism in society.
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.
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.
Regarding your #4: just shut up.
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.
The formula for this location quotient is
(# of Hate Tweets in State / # of Hate Tweets in USA)
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(# of ALL Tweets in State / # of ALL Tweets in USA)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.
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.
Which is to say, I agree with you.
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.
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 hope you are right but that is bold prediction about the future path of humanity.
http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-supporters-on-twitter-...
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),"
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.
I've no idea how widespread those cases are, but I do wonder.
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.
But no, white people vote for Romney because of the issues, black people vote for Obama because they are racist, Of course!
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).
1984 Walter Mondale 90% Ronald Reagan 9%
1988 Michael Dukakis 90% George H.W. Bush 10%
1992 Bill Clinton 83% George H.W. Bush 10%
1996 Bill Clinton 84% Bob Dole 12%
2000 Al Gore 90% George W. Bush 9%
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.
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.
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.
Also, I named a situation when voting for Obama because he is black is ok and not racist.
Making a decision based on race is racist. To think otherwise is to continue to perpetuate racism and remain part of the problem.
You mistake is to assume symmetry where there is none.
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.
Check your motherfucking privilege.
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.
> 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.
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".
If you have counter evidence which shows a different geographic makeup, or otherwise addresses the claims made by the OP, then please share.
http://twitchy.com/2012/11/06/death-threats-against-mitt-rom...
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."
"Shut up. That other food isn't pizza!"
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.
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
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'?
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."
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.
"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.)
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.
"The other side does it too" is not a rationale. It didn't work with your mom when you were 6, and it doesn't work in the real world either.
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.
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.
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.
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:
"It looks like he's at a family reunion."
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.
This is statistics, not racism.
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.
And that is a huge difference.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege_(social_inequality)
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.
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.
Your "racism" is too small.