Ethnic slurs on Twitter in the US: Social listening study

Since some posters have been proclaiming some states more racist than others I figured I would do a little research on the subject. Found this interesting analysis of Twitter data based upon tweets by states from nuetral language tweets vs racial slur tweets. Their methodology is the following:

## Methodology

*To determine the most and least racist U.S. states, we collected tweets featuring neutral terminology and tweets containing racial slurs. We then calculated the share of hateful tweets in the total volume of tweets per state. *

Say, in California, there were 7317 race-conscious tweets vs. 1298 tweets containing racial slurs. Therefore, the share of hateful tweets in California is 1298/(7317+1298) = 15.07%.

Glad to see that Texas as a top 4 and painted very green on the map.

The bottom 5 were scattered across the map from Delaware, SD, Maine, Mississippin, and Hawaii.

10 U.S. states with the most ethnic slurs

  1. Delaware (21.4% of all race-related tweets contained slurs)
  2. South Dakota (20%)
  3. Maine (19.25%)
  4. Mississippi (18.59%)
  5. Hawaii (17.06%)
  6. Kansas (16.95%)
  7. Wisconsin (16.95%)
  8. Arkansas (16.83%)
  9. West Virginia (16.78%)
  10. Maryland (16.59%)

10 U.S. states with the fewest ethnic slurs

  1. Vermont (6.96% of all race-related tweets contained slurs)
  2. New Hampshire (11.56%)
  3. Alaska (11.59%)
  4. Texas (12.46%)
  5. Wyoming (12.49%)
  6. North Dakota (13.08%)
  7. Massachusetts (13.24%)
  8. Michigan (13.5%)
  9. New York (13.6%)
  10. Georgia (13.69%)

I believe some will be surprised by Georgia being a top 10 considering some recent posts about GA.

lol yeah I’m gonna have to call bunk on this. The 2 tweets that are given as examples are laughable. There’s better sociological methods than this.

Are you talking about the Arab and Russian examples? I didn’t really view them as common examples from the study, but outliers from the main study. Somewhat silly to include those, they both seemed out of place.

The study is just a percentage of total Tweets from each state that include a racial slur for a defined period of time. They could have given examples of what fell under their definition of racial slurs but they didn’t in the article. That might have added a bit more clarity.

This is an interesting way to measure racism per
state, and I applaud the author/researchers creativity here. But without more details on the
methodology it’s hard to assess what is really being
measured. Just a few problems I see are are how many people you know are active tweeters ? In my circle of friends and family it’s very few that send tweets. So maybe they are measuring only the prolific loudmouths amongst us.

Another thing to consider is when a tweet may use a term in a sarcastic way. Unless you read each thread, I’m not sure how the researchers make this determination. Remember on the old Coog fans board with the phrase about “west coast sources” :wink:

There also doesn’t seem to be a big percentage difference between most and least racial slurs. They
mostly are all in the teens.

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Here is another study from WalletHub that ranks Texas 2nd with making the most racial progress. Some alignment with some Twitter data study listed above but they are measuring different things. There are many more, but there are many that introduce politics into the study which I’ll refrain from posting.

WalletHub’s study:

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This study has almost nothing to do with how racist a state is, they even have that disclamer, but I will play. Delaware, South Dakota, Maine? Wouldn’t a better metric be racist tweets per capita? No body really talks about race in those states because they lack diversity. No body tweets about race in Maine because there are no local reasons to so that might be the reason a higher percentage use slurs. A place like Texas would have many more tweets about race as we have local events going on all the time.

I have family from South Dakota, the main issue there is white people being racist towards Native Americans and that is the only time you ever hear about race.

Interesting capsule, even if not very thorough. There is also a problem within ethnic groups and classism. Mostly white elites looking down upon groups like hillbillies, bumpkins, hicks, and rubes. It occurs in all groups though.