Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama’s Re-election
The day after the Election, floatingsheep searched tweets with the words “monkey,” “nigger,” “Obama,” “reelected” and “won.” Then, they isolated those that were geotagged with a location…..
http://www.floatingsheep.org/2012/11/mapping-racist-tweets-in-response-to.html
November 08, 2012
Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama’s Re-election
Note: for questions about the methodology/approach of this post, see the FAQ (added 16:20 EST 11/9/2012).
Note: as of 11:00 EST 11/10/2012, we have disabled commenting on this post.During the day after the 2012 presidential election we took note of a spike in hate speech on Twitter referring to President Obama’s re-election, as chronicled by Jezebel (thanks to Chris Van Dyke for bringing this our attention). It is a useful reminder that technology reflects the society in which it is based, both the good and the bad. Information space is not divorced from everyday life and racism extends into the geoweb and helps shapes its contours; and in turn, data from the geoweb can be used to reflect the geographies of racist practice back onto the places from which they emerged.
Using DOLLY we collected all the geocoded tweets from the last week (beginning November 1) with racist terms that also reference the election in order to understand how these everyday acts of explicit racism are spatially distributed. ——>Continued