Where America's Racist Tweets Come From - 0 views
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Anthony Mirabile on 11 Nov 12*Disclaimer: Article above contains profane/vulgar language This article details the findings of the blog 'Jezebel', who compiled a series of racist, anti-Obama tweets following the U.S election, and 'Floating Sheep' who trended those tweets and imposed them over a map of the United States. Using the knowledge of geo-coded tweets and the Twitter search bar, Floating Sheep was able to trend racist anti-Obama tweets from November 1-7. They used an 'LQ' algorithm which compared a state's ratio of racist to normal tweets to the entire country's ratio of racist to normal tweets. States with an LQ score of 1 were on par with the country, while those 1 had more racist tweets on average. After trending the reassuringly low 395 tweets, the study found (unsurprisingly) that higher LQ scores came from South-Eastern states, with Alabama at 8.1 and Mississipi at 7.4. This relates to Privacy and Security because Floating Sheep used geo-coding to find out where the cruel tweets originated from. This relates to eLifestyle because the internet harbours some of the most ignorant/hateful people who make callous remarks without realizing everything that you do can be and often is tracked. This relates to ICS20 because we promote a positive online environment and we frown upon things like racism and vulgar language; the very opposite of what these people mentioned in the article are portraying. If there is a silver lining to this study, it is that in this technological era, we are able to publicize ignorance and judge/analyze those who advocate awful messages.