Study Finds 10,000 Slurs A Day Posted On Twitter

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.

The study found that slurs were employed in six distinct ways: negative stereotype; casual use of slurs; targeted abuse; appropriated; non-derogatory; and offline action/ideologically driven.

The most common type of slurs were actually meant in a non-offensive, non-abusive manner, or to express in-group solidarity.
This group represented between 47.5-70 percent of tweets, depending on whether human or computer analysis were employed.

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.