How Much Tweet Hate in Your Region?

Wow – this is pretty disgusting - especially when I saw how much of the Midwest was included on the maps.

Brought to my attention on Crooks and Liars this morning. 

Hate in 140 Characters, Mapped

If you've spent any time on Twitter, you've inevitably bumped up against someone who is hateful. If you tweet about politics on Twitter, racist and homophobic tweets are as common as falling leaves on an autumn day. They come from many different sources, as you've seen just from our Stupid Right-Wing Tweets feature.

Geographically, though, they emanate from a concentrated area of the South and Midwest, as shown on the map above, as analyzed by FloatingSheep.org:

After you have read the snips and review at Crooks and Liars – then you really need to read the whole article that the piece at Cooks and Liars is based on – and the comments – it will take you awhile.

The prominence of debates around online bullying and the censorship of hate speech prompted us to examine how social media has become an important conduit for hate speech, and how particular terminology used to degrade a given minority group is expressed geographically. As we’ve documented in a variety of cases, the virtual spaces of social media are intensely tied to particular socio-spatial contexts in the offline world, and as this work shows, the geography of online hate speech is no different.

Then – look at the  full interactive map of “Hate in 140 Characters”

It’s pretty discouraging.