Abodo, an online rental service, analyzed anti-black tweets by city from June 2014 to December 2015 (Courtesy of Abodo)
A new study by the online rental service Abodo reveals the most racist cities in the United States by taking a hard look at the type of tweets residents post.
According to the researchers of the “America’s most P.C. [politically correct] and prejudiced places” study, they “looked at terms that run the gamut from P.C. to just plain prejudiced, and found over 12 million tweets from June 2014 to December 2015 – more than enough to tell a fascinating story of American attitudes across the nation.”
The researchers started their investigation on the macro level—looking at the nation as a whole and then went small. They also inadvertently reveal that racism and prejudice online is almost inescapable at this point— even while Twitter has made efforts to make their community more inclusive with various initiatives.
From the 12 million tweets they looked at, four southern states came in the top ten most derogatory states. Southern states like Georgia, Texas, Maryland, and Louisiana were joined by states that would be considered progressive such as Rhode Island, Delaware, California and Michigan as the most derogatory.
The study also discovered that Louisiana and West Virginia used the n-word the most when tweeting.
West Virginia shows the highest rate of hate speech in tweets with 83.2 anti-Black tweets per 100,000 tweets that has some form of Black prejudice in them. In second and third place are Maryland and Louisiana, with 36.5 and 31.3 respectively per 100,000. All of these figures also correlates to a 2015 study of Google searches that reveals that searches for the N-word showed very high levels of searches in West Virginia and Louisiana.
When the researchers started to look at the cities with the most derogatory tweets, they found out that the cities in those states mentioned before also had high usage of anti-Black slurs. Southern cities with large African-American populations such as Baltimore, Atlanta, and New Orleans were the top three cities to have anti-Black tweets. These areas also had neutral terms in tweets such as “Black,” “Black People,” and “African-American.”
The study aims at finding renters a tolerant community to live that is free of bigotry and prejudice. It also reveals that the country has a long way to go in terms of race.
