The problem I have with this is that it is needlessly stirring racial divides. 395 tweets out of ~120 million voters? Come on, do something positive for our country like mapping out the tweets of people still needing help from Sandy.
I have a huge problem with people submitting bug reports because it needlessly creates the perception that the software is buggy.
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.
I have the exact same problem, I'm sure that there are many racists in our country, but this graphic is pretty garbage.
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.
One thing to take into account: A lot of racists probably are technologically backward and don't use Twitter.
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'll personally f*****g kill Romney if he try's some dumb nazi s**t f**k that (sic),"
I looked through floatingsheep's other recent blogs and they didn't cover that one.
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.
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'?
If you're not looking at this through our team vs. their team glasses, you might notice that the study didn't discover that racism was deplorable. It makes speculations about where racists among the twitter demographic in the US live, by taking advantage of an event which was bound to bring them out in force.
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.
Agreed. It reminds me a bit of the fallacy of criminalizing "hate speech", which you are seeing in Europe lately. It actually gives the bigots a bit of a legitimate grievance, in that their freedom of speech is being eroded. Besides, personally, if someone is eager to inform me about what an idiot they are, I see no advantage in legally preventing them. I think the cult of political correctness has actually been quite damaging to race relations.
Is that racism such as calling a person a monkey or a n*er, or is that violent speech absent of racial slurs? One could make a violent statement, a racist statement and a violent, racist statement.
The difference between threats and hate speech is that hate speech is intended to oppress an already marginalized group, as a group. That is, there are two criminal acts (1) threatening the individual (2) oppressing the group, happening as a result of one act of speech. This justifies a special treatment for it in law, differing from mere threats.
With a sample size of 395, given the intensity of feeling around general elections, all this really does is show that America is staggeringly not racist.
If this was a full scientific study, I'd agree. Lets keep in mind that it isn't, and it's just a reflection of what was actually said.
It isn't fair to draw conclusions from this such as "Alabama is a racist!?!?", but the data do still say something.
As a young "minority", living in the South (Appalachia), I just don't get this... People in the South have been as kind, welcoming, and intelligent as people from other areas I've lived/visited.
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 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.
>Talk about your sexist, racist , ageist comments!
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.
“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:
I's difficult to say from context whether that was meant in a racist manner. From a purely factual perspective it is true that GOP votes are older, whiter and male.
Think about it. If you heard "The problem with Democrats is young minority women" what would that mean to you? Right now, nothing, but if you (assuming you are male) were unable to get a prostate exam without spending $18209389012830 whereas it was, and always was, easy for women to get breast exams for free under their insurance, this statement would mean something.
Lets examine that statement: "the problem with Republicans is old white guys."
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.
Ugh. Being from Alabama, this is just sad. But, I guess unsurprising given the majority demographic here.
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.
This is a really good point IMHO. People say all sorts of things behind closed doors. But self-censorship in public is almost certainly more common in some areas of the country than in others.
That's interesting, but thankfully they only had 395 tweets so I wonder if you can get something really meaningful with a set of data so small. Looks like there's some correlation with Rommey's voting states though.
After reviewing their list of "Top 10 Floating Sheep Maps" that appears in the sidebar, it's a reasonable assumption that this is a site with a certain world view. The readers who agree with that world view (say, /r/politics) won't particularly care about the statistical sample size as long as the results reinforce their beliefs.
Of course it's correlated with the red states; when the person they didn't want to see win won, they said anything they could to degrade him. Certainly the n word is the easiest and most offensive word to throw out, but that doesn't necessarily imply racism. Though I'm not defending their use of that extremely offensive word, it's highly disingenuous to equate it to racism.
Speaking as a black person, I can see cases where racist tweets would have been flagged, but weren't really racist. A black person (in some circles) could say, "Damn, that nigger Obama was reelected!" Is this racist? In this case, the use of "nigger" could be a term of endearment. It would have still been flagged during this survey.
First of all, how do you filter by "black people" on Twitter? Second, the authors were probably grabbing all tweets that contained certain racial epithets. The word "riot" isn't racist.
[+] [-] nhebb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glesica|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Claudus|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] king_jester|13 years ago|reply
The divides exist, pointing that out doesn't make things worse and helps people be more aware of racism in society.
[+] [-] no_more_death|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Anechoic|13 years ago|reply
It's 395 geocoded tweets, not 395 tweets total across Twitter.
[+] [-] jfaucett|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crusso|13 years ago|reply
http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-supporters-on-twitter-...
What is any less hateful about them?
I looked through floatingsheep's other recent blogs and they didn't cover that one.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.
[+] [-] chez17|13 years ago|reply
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'?
[+] [-] pessimizer|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rpm4321|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revscat|13 years ago|reply
If you have counter evidence which shows a different geographic makeup, or otherwise addresses the claims made by the OP, then please share.
[+] [-] jhowell|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JulianMorrison|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troels|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gyardley|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omnisci|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yoms|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dogfu6|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mistercow|13 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] engtech|13 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] Angostura|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omnisci|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revscat|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mmuro|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rwhitman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glesica|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pingou|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lylejohnson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnayr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjgoins|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hugh4life|13 years ago|reply
Your "racism" is too small.
[+] [-] brandoncor|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tharris0101|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] paulhauggis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistercow|13 years ago|reply