If you’ve ever wondered where the most homophobic regions of the country are, the map junkies over at FloatingSheep.org may have just answered your question. “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,” the mapmakers explain on their site, “ and how particular terminology used to degrade a given minority group is expressed geographically.”
Between June, 2012 and April, 2013, the makers of the maps logged geo-coded Tweets. They filtered the Tweets using a list of derogatory terms and then manually went through the list to identify the Tweets used in a negative manner. (The maps also explored levels of hate based on race.)
Interestingly, population density has very little, if any, bearing on the level of hatred in the United States. As an example, the makers of the maps cited California. Despite having some of the most population-dense cities in the country, it also had some of the lowest levels of hatred. And while many of the reddest regions appear east of the Mississippi River, the actual areas themselves tend to be rural.
“Hateful Tweets were aggregated to the county level and then normalized by the total number of Tweets in each county. This then shows a comparison of places with disproportionately high amounts of a particular hate word relative to all Tweeting activity. For example, Orange County, Calif. has the highest absolute number of Tweets mentioning many of the slurs, but because of its significant overall Twitter activity, such hateful Tweets are less prominent and therefore do not appear as prominently on our map. So when viewing the map at a broad scale, it’s best not to be covered with the blue smog of hate, as even the lower end of the scale includes the presence of hateful tweeting activity.”
The researchers are not without their critics. Some have argued that the maps fail to provide context. Were certain words used among members of the same ethnic or sexual minority, for example, in an ironic or tribal context? Others say it’s a hit piece against white, rural America arguing that if a map were made showing where the highest rates of crime were, it would correlate to where the highest concentrations of black people were without taking into consideration the context of those statistics as well.
The researchers, however, seemed unbowed. “If you are a disgruntled white male who feels the persistence of hatred toward minority groups is a license to complain about how discrimination against you is being ignored, just stop.”
