The American Hate Map

The Hate Map is a heat map of offensive messages made on Twitter. The map shows the rough location of every geocoded tweet in the United States from June 2012 - April 2013 that contained one or more of ten 'hate words'.

Every tweet was read by a human to determine that only messages meant as negative were used on the map. Users of the map can view three different heat maps, one for homophobic tweets, one for racist tweets and one anti-diasabled tweets. The user can also view individual heat maps for any one of the ten offensive words.

At first sight the heat maps appear to be very simialr to a population heat map of America but if you look in more detail you can see that there is more than just population density at work in hate messages on Twitter. For example, relatively densely populated California, seems to be also relatively free of hate speech.

You can find out more about the methodology behind the making of this map at the excellent Floating Sheep blog.