If we’ve learned one thing from this presidential election, it’s that we’re a nation divided by, and overrun with, hatred. No matter your skin color, gender, race, sexual orientation, physical appearance, or any other attribute, some segment of our society has a pronounced bias against you, and they’re not afraid to announce it on social media. Hell, some of the leaders of the presidential pack seem like they’re running their whole campaign on a steady stream of rage and hate, a particularly ugly methodology that one wouldn’t expect to work as well as it has been.
Blustery politicians aside, much of this hatred, especially on social media, is perpetuated under false names. Nothing like anonymity and a world-spanning platform to bring out the very best in people, right? But just because we can’t point fingers at the the exact trolls who perpetuate the web’s ugly undercurrent, we can use a variety of tools to search their public posts, analyzing what is said where, and narrowing down at least which parts of our country think that “making America great again” involves racial prejudice, misogyny, or some other form of base intolerance. This is exactly what apartment location start-up Abodo did, scanning millions of tweets from June 2014 through December 2015 for a laundry list of racial slurs, derogatory slang terms, and more to compile a ranking of where our most ignorant tendencies show up with the greatest frequency, and where we’re the most politically correct.
The results are surprising in some areas, less-so in others. For example, Louisiana has the most anti-black tweets as a state, which sadly isn’t shocking. Yet the “honor” for most anti-black tweets from a single city goes by a wide margin to Baltimore, Maryland, which has publicly had its share of race-based problems in the past year. Conversely, the state with the most anti-Hispanic sentiments on Twitter is California, with the harshest city being Bakersfield.
Louisiana again comes in tops in regards to hatred towards women, although that changes when you remove the term “bitch” from the results, and Nevada is suddenly on top. The study notes this could potentially be attributed to the large amount of adult entertainment, which uses derogatory terms for women in their promotional materials. Not all the negativity is rooted in the southern states, either--New Hampshire and Rhode Island also placed high in this category.
When you get to transgender terms, Nevada flies to the top, with a distant second being New York. Once again, the study cautions that, since the vast majority of these negative tweets hail from Las Vegas, porn industry promotions could be skewing the statistics. That said, Orlando, Florida, lacks this excuse, and is way, way out in front from a city standpoint.
See all the results, including those for homophobia and obesity, below.
So what if you want to live out your days peacefully ensconced in the least vitriol-filled state? According to the statistics below, your PC paradise awaits, if you don’t mind wide open spaces.
Maybe as a species we just don’t like being crowded too close together, but there definitely appears to be a trend of lower populations equaling less intolerance. Or maybe there just aren’t as many people tweeting in Wyoming as, say, Louisiana. Either way, it's a sad and scary time to be alive.
