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Comment by revscat | Hacker News Reader

It is deplorable, but I am not sure how this is not a red herring. It's not even a statistical sample: it's a single case.

If you have counter evidence which shows a different geographic makeup, or otherwise addresses the claims made by the OP, then please share.

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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.

There is a reason those are not acceptable sources...

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.

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

Yeah, I inform my world view with Cosmopolitan and the The National Enquirer as well.

Here are quite a few examples...

http://twitchy.com/2012/11/06/death-threats-against-mitt-rom...

That doesn't address the OP, though. Nor are they racist in nature.

> Nor are they racist in nature.

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!"

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