The President

According to some recent tweets, yes.

On November 7^th 2012, President Barack Obama was re-elected President of the United States over Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Though many in the nation cheered, others were not so happy. Like many do nowadays, they took to the internet, or more specifically to Twitter, to voice their complaints.

Unsurprisingly, some users decided that it is easier to fit a slew of racist slurs into 140 words than any legitimate complaints about Obama’s policies. It’s no secret that President Obama is of African-American descent, and that racism exists.  It’s the reality of the situation.

The folks over at jezebel.com made a gallery comprised of the racist tweets directed towards President Obama. This caught the attention of the people of floatingsheep.org, a website dedicated to mapping and analyzing user generated geoencoded data. After seeing the tweets, they decided to create a map using geoencoded tweets to show the areas of the U.S with the most racist post-election tweets relating to President Obama.

The site compared the hate tweets coming out of a state and compared them to the overall number of tweets coming out of the state. They used a location quotient inspired method (LQ) to show the number of a states racist tweets relative to its total tweets. They score it based on 1.0. 1.0 means relatively the same racist tweets versus non-racist. Above 1.0 means there are more racist tweets than normal tweets. Alabama had the highest score at 8.1.

Adam Dodson, a senior at Bob Jones said, “It’s not surprising.”

Jasmine Duncan, another senior said, “These tweets are not shocking since they do come from Alabama. There are still a lot of racist people here.”

Floating Sheep’s Map

http://www.floatingsheep.org/2012/11/mapping-racist-tweets-in-response-to.html