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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Would like to see per-capita, or age profile. One hot spot is centered on eastern Iowa/western Illinois. I live there, and am utterly surprised by this. That coincides on a cluster of college campuses; perhaps its careless language by college students?

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The zoom level seems to make the data look very different. Zoomed out and the entire midwest is red, zoom in and it looks like there is one racist/homophobe in each of Muscatine, Iowa and Peoria, Illinois.

It's also unclear what criteria was used to define negative. If a reference to Lonely Island's "no homo" song gets flagged as negative for example, that may not fit in most people's definition of hate speech.

Total wild ass guess, but I'd bet the total number of tweets for a region is roughly proportional to its total population. If that's true, the normalized results you see here will be very similar to the per-capita results. It'd be interesting to verify this, however. It would tell you "this region's twitter users are X% [more|less] 'hateful' than the region's general population."

There's no way Montanans tweet just as often as Californians.

It'd be interesting to find out. There are a lot of very diverse populations in California.

[Edit: I should place extra emphasis on the word "roughly," in my OP as well.]

>perhaps its careless language by college students?

An interesting distinction you've made there.

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