Culture
Where Americans Tweet Messages of Hate
Clear and distressing pockets of hate speech.
Our friends over at Floating Sheep released a series of fascinating, if depressing, maps today of the "geography of hate" across America.
The interactive maps are based on a keyword search of geotagged tweets. Students from Humboldt State checked each tweet for a negative, positive, or neutral connotation, ultimately identifying more than 150,000 hateful tweets with this location info. Each negative tweet was totaled by county and then normalized by comparing that to the county's total tweets, enabling the Floating Sheep geographers to identify places with "disproportionately high amounts" of hateful tweets.