StormX
Banned
- 10,000 racist tweets are sent ever day, a major new study into racism on social networks has discovered.
- Research by the think tank Demos found the biggest insult was 'white boy'.
- Researchers analysed 126,975 English-language tweets from across the globe over a 9-day period in the biggest ever study of Twitter racism.
Researchers revealed the most common racial slurs used on the micro-blogging site included ‘whitey’ and ‘pikey’.
However, as many as 70% of tweets using such language were deemed to be using slurs in non-derogatory fashion.
'This sparks the debate about the extent to which Twitter truly is a platform for racism and abusive language,' the report claims.
Jamie Bartlett, Director of CASM at Demos and author of the report, said: 'Twitter provides us with a remarkable window into how people talk, argue, debate, and discuss issues of the day.
'While there are a lot of racial slurs being used on Twitter, the overwhelming majority of them are not used in an obviously prejudicial or hateful way.
'This study shows just how difficult it is to know what people really mean on the basis of a tweet.
'Context is king, and often it’s more or less lost on Twitter.' Of the 126,975 English-language tweets from across the globe, further analysis suggests only 1% of tweets used a racial slur in an ideological context within a political statement or in a call to action in the real world.
Analysis found that as few as 500 tweets a day were directed at an individual and appeared on first sight to be abusive.
'There were very few cases that presented an imminent threat of violence, or where individuals directly or indirectly incited offline violent action,' the report's authors said.
'We estimate that, at the very most, fewer than 100 tweets are sent each day which might be interpreted as threatening any kind of violence or offline action.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...s-10-000-slurs-DAY-posted-social-network.html
Obama and Holder should do something about it....
