A great deal of Americans were justifiably upset when Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lost the election. But rather than using social media to express their frustration and disappointment in an elegant way, many Twitter users instead used the platform to post shockingly racist tweets, calling President Obama a ‘n*****’ and a ‘monkey.’ A map collected [...]

Feeds Editorials Times Online

Sunday Times 2

The Racist States of America

By Beth Stebner
View(s):

A great deal of Americans were justifiably upset when Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lost the election. But rather than using social media to express their frustration and disappointment in an elegant way, many Twitter users instead used the platform to post shockingly racist tweets, calling President Obama a ‘n*****’ and a ‘monkey.’

A map collected by Floating Sheep shows the shocking demographic of racist ‘hate tweets,’ many of them collected from states that were won by Romney.

The majority of the tweets, as Jezebel noted, were often from young white residents in southern states. MailOnline has chosen not to name these social media users.

One male user wrote on Election Day following Romney’s loss: ‘Ok we pick a worthless n***** over a full blooded American what the h*** has our world come its (sic) called the white house for a reason.’
Another wrote: ‘F*** you, Obama. Your (sic) a stupid n***** and you don’t do anything good for our country.’

Using geodata called DOLLY (Data On Local Life and You), Floating Sheep mapped out tweets beginning November 1. They then calculated the percentage of each state’s so-called hate tweets in relation to the gross number of tweets coming out of that state.

Their results showed that states like Arkansas and Mississippi were relatively inundated with racist tweets. However, they measured only the quantity of tweets, noting that a lone Twitter user could be sending out dozens of vitriolic tweets all on their own, thus adding to the location-inspired measure, or LQ.

The map also reveals other southern states like Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas had their fair share of people tweeting bigoted things. Floating Sheep noted that both the East and West coast had a lower number of such tweets.

The site noted, too, that the phenomenon wasn’t only in the south – a series of racist tweets trickled up the Eastern Seaboard, and could also be found in Utah and Missouri.

While it was not openly addressed by the candidates on the campaign trail, political pundits have insisted that demographics and race played a huge role in helping Obama keep the White House.

On Election Day, a riot broke out at The University of Mississippi – known as Ole Miss – as more than 400 students yelled out racial slurs and burned Obama-Biden campaign posters after the Democratic incumbent was crowned the victor.

Emotions ran high among the angered college conservatives in Oxford, Mississippi, with university police being called in shortly after midnight to diffuse the crowd.

The incident began as a small gathering of frustrated voters, meeting to share their misery at Obama getting another four years in office, shortly after midnight. But word soon spread over social media and the crowd began to swell to hundreds of students, yelling out racial slurs, chanting anti-Obama rhetoric and some reportedly throwing rocks at cars. Police were called and told the crowd to go home but their presence only attracted more attention and the mass began to multiply.

Two students were arrested in the fracas, one for public intoxication and one for failure to comply with police orders, the university confirmed.

‘Disperse or go to jail,’ University Police Department officers told the crowd, according to the student newspaper, The Daily Mississippian.

But Ole Miss student Nicholas Carr tweeted that the whole thing was being overblown, saying that more people were taking pictures of the so-called riot than actually joining in on the chanting.

‘I was there the whole time. No rocks were thrown. There was 1 sign lit on fire. For about 45 seconds,’ Carr wrote.

‘Mostly, it was 100s of college kids who heard the word riot and ran to take pictures and see what it was about. Again, no rocks or missiles thrown.’

But the school’s administration confronted students on Wednesday and blasted Tuesday’s behavior as ‘a very immature and uncivil approach to expressing their views about the election,’ University of Mississippi Chancellor Dan Jones said in statement

‘The gathering seems to have been fueled by social media, and the conversation should have stayed there.’

© Daily Mail, London




Share This Post

DeliciousDiggGoogleStumbleuponRedditTechnoratiYahooBloggerMyspace
comments powered by Disqus

Advertising Rates

Please contact the advertising office on 011 - 2479521 for the advertising rates.