Community Corner

Do People Tweet Racist, Homophobic Slurs from Maryland?

A new geotagging project maps which states spew the most hate speech online.

The adage "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" might have missed the Twitter generation. The 7-year-old social network has attracted a number of users looking to do away with polite conversation in favor of the frequent and elated use of a handful of words most only refer to by the first letter: the "n" word, the "f" word, the "b" word and the like.

The geographers at Floating Sheep, an online project that gained attention for mapping where in the United States people tweeted racist slurs following President Barack Obama's re-election, recently created a new map called "The Geography of Hate."  

Here's why, according to the creators:

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"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.

Rather than focusing just on hate directed towards a single individual at a single point in time, we wanted to analyze a broader swath of discriminatory speech in social media, including the usage of racist, homophobic and ableist slurs."

Read the rest of the explanation at floatingsheep.org.

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The map searched for words with a history of racism, homophobia and abelism (oppression of people with disabilities) and figured out where the respective tweeter was located.

The map moves from deep red (a lot of hate speech) to deep blue (moderate) to a sort of seafoam blue where there weren't a lot of online slurs. 

So what color is Maryland? Montgomery County?

Not surprisingly, the eastern portion of the United States is much redder than the west, partially because it's more populous, according to the map's frequently asked questions. But zoomed in, Maryland on the map is very neutral, with the exception of some spots in areas near Harford and Carroll counties that get very blue when you filter the map for homophobic slurs.

One  may filter the interactive map for specific slurs or for general homophobic, racist or ableist language.

Take a look at the map online, here.


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