Making America Hate Again? Twitter and Hate Crime Under Trump

When individuals of influence, including political candidates and heads of state employ such words, the issue can exist especially pronounced.

In the run-up to, and since his election as President of the United States, Donald Trump's words have attracted a lot of attention. Many commentators and activists have charged that Trump's rhetoric has fueled hate crimes in the United States confronting minorities. Until recently, many individuals voicing such concerns pointed to high-profile individual cases, rather than systematic data. At present that's changing every bit new research is emerging.

Hatewatch spoke with Karsten Muller and Carlo Schwarz, two researchers at the University of Warwick in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland who have been studying the bear on of detest speech on social media and how that translates to hate crimes in the real world. Muller and Schwarz discuss their latest report, "Making America Hate Again? Twitter and Hate Crime Under Trump"

Their study used Twitter and FBI hate crimes data to come to a stark conclusion: detest crimes against Muslims and Latinos occurred shortly later Trump made disparaging tweets about Muslims and Latinos. Moreover these anti-Muslim and anti-Latino detest crimes were physically concentrated in parts of the country where there is high Twitter usage.

Karsten and Carlo, tin can y'all give us an overview of your research interests and your contempo written report on President Trump's tweets and Muslim hate crimes?

Carlo: We are economists working in slightly different areas, but we both take an interest in what people usually call political economy. What we try to do is to apply mod quantitative methods to study political outcomes and the role of social media. In our most recent study, nosotros find that the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the U.S. has increased quite markedly under Trump. We show that this increment started with the beginning of Trump's presidential entrada and is predominately driven by U.Due south. counties where a large fraction of the population uses Twitter. The data likewise show that this increase cannot be easily explained by differences in demographics, votes for Republicans, offense rates, media consumption or other factors.

Karsten: The second affair we do in the newspaper is to look at the correlation between Trump'southward tweets about Islam-related topics and detest crimes that target Muslims. And what we find is that this correlation is very stiff after Trump had started his campaign, but basically nothing earlier. Nosotros likewise find that when Trump tweets most Muslims, hate crimes increases disproportionately in those areas where many people use Twitter. It is also of import to annotation that detest crimes confronting Muslims were not systematically higher in those areas during previous presidencies, and then it seems unlikely we are simply capturing the fact that people in some areas dislike Muslims more than in others.

Are you claiming Trump'due south tweets take caused hate crimes?

Karsten: We are very careful non to make that merits in the paper because I recollect it is extremely difficult to tell based on our data. After all, we are not looking at a controlled laboratory experiment and then there is always room for other drivers. Merely if you look at the results, some betoken in that management, for example that Trump's tweets are particularly correlated with future detest crimes in counties where many people use Twitter.

Carlo: A simple thing to do here is to think about what alternative stories could explain our findings. For instance, one could imagine that people who Trump himself follows (such as Trick & Friends or Alex Jones) are the real driving gene. Or that people have recently become more than radicalized in rural areas, or where the bulk votes Republican. But a conscientious look at the data reveals that Twitter usage is in fact lower in counties where people tend to vote Republican and in rural areas, and nosotros use some survey data to bear witness that Twitter users generally prefer CNN or MSNBC over Fox News. These factors also cannot hands explain why the increase in anti-Muslim detest crimes should occur precisely with Trump's entrada commencement and not before or afterward.

Karsten: So overall, nosotros accept our findings as suggestive of a potential connectedness between social media and hate crimes. Simply at the end of the day, readers have to brand upwards their ain minds.

What were some of the other key findings that stood out with regard to Muslims?

Karsten: What really stands out to me is just how strong the correlation of Trump'southward tweets is with future anti-Muslim hate crimes. So, for example, one might be worried that Trump simply tweets nearly Muslims when people are mostly very interested in everything related to Islam. Only what we find is that Trump'southward tweets are correlated with hate crimes even if we kickoff even if nosotros control for the event of general attending to Islam-related topics (as measured by Google Searches). Although there are other explanations, I also found it striking that you see a spike in detest crimes confronting Muslims in the week of the Presidential election, but only in areas where many people use Twitter.

Carlo: Another thing I institute quite interesting is that Trump'southward tweets well-nigh Muslims are not correlated with other types of hate crimes. The reason this is important is because 1 could easily imagine that people but happen to be specially angry at minorities in some weeks compared to others, and that Trump is just office of that. Only if this was true, we would besides expect there to be more hate crimes against Latinos, or LGBTQ people or African Americans, which does non seem to be the case at all. We likewise practice not observe whatever evidence that other types of hate crimes increased in areas with many Twitter users around Trump's campaign start — except a small shift for anti-Latino crimes.

Your study also noticed a statistically significant association between anti-Latino tweets and hate crimes. Why do you think at that place has been a similar, but less robust set of results?

Karsten: When nosotros started our study, we merely had data on hate crimes until the end of 2015 — after Trump'due south campaign started in June 2015, but earlier his election. And what you see in the data is a very strong correlation between Trump's tweets about Latinos and subsequent anti-ethnic hate crimes starting with the beginning of his campaign until December 2015, while there is virtually no correlation before. Afterward the 2016 information were released, we found that the effect becomes substantially weaker from around mid-2016 onwards.

Carlo: When nosotros looked at that more closely — and we call up that is consistent with the media coverage during that time as well — Trump toned downwards his anti-Latino rhetoric quite a lot in the run-up to the entrada. In that location was, for case, his tweet with a taco basin on Cinco de Mayo 2016. If y'all become through Trump'south Twitter feed in the pre-ballot menstruum, y'all will see only a handful tweets about Latinos at all during that time. And while hate crimes against Latinos remained slightly elevated in areas with many Twitter users during that time, that means the correlation with the timing of Trump's tweets became weaker. A potential interpretation is that it is non that the results are so much weaker than those for anti-Muslim hate crime, it'south merely that Trump essentially stopped tweeting negative things near Latinos.

How does this study compare and contrast with your earlier investigation into the online activities of the far-right and nativist political party Alternative for Germany (AfD)?

Carlo: In our written report on Germany, we plant a very similar correlation betwixt posts almost refugees on the AfD's Facebook page and crimes targeting refugees. We await at these two studies as complementary, fifty-fifty though they utilise somewhat different methodologies. In the German setting, we take very granular data on internet and Facebook outages that nosotros tin utilize every bit "quasi-experiments" to get at the causal effect of social media. And what we found there is that, even if you compare neighboring cities, refugees are more than likely to be victims of fierce attacks where many people apply social media, particularly when tensions are high. Importantly, these are relative effects.

What is different for the U.S. is that we discover this link between Trump's campaign get-go and the increase in the accented number of hate crimes against precisely those minorities in his verbal crosshairs (e.k. Muslims and Latinos), making the link by using Trump'south tweets. and FBI detest crimes dataset. Past using the FBI hate crimes statistics, it likewise allow us to compare the contempo modify in detest crimes to those under presidents since 1990s.

For civically witting users of the internet, what are the most important takeaways and implications from your research?

Carlo:  On one hand, our goal is to suggest that politicians should not ignore social media, because the correlation with real-life hate crimes seems to exist pretty strong. We recall that this discussion should be taken seriously. On the other hand, we want to caution against any attempts at censorship. Some countries have an outright ban on certain social media platforms, and these states are normally non known for their open up political discourse and freedom of spoken communication. The challenge is to come up up with solutions that can help protect citizens from fierce extremists without imposing drastic limits on liberty of expression. In the terminate, the people who actually commit hate crimes are the ones we accept to agree accountable.

Karsten: I want to give a somewhat unlike perspective here. Many people talk about a potential "nighttime side" of social media, but the number of studies that have actually looked at this issue with information is surprisingly small. One of the most important takeaways for me is that as a society we should exist spending more time and resources to support researchers working on this area. It is conspicuously something that many people care nigh, and it matters tremendously for policymakers also.

What practice you plan to do next in your inquiry?

Karsten: Nosotros think a large open question is to come up up with more physical ways of measuring whether "echo chambers" on social media actually exist, and how they differ from echo chambers in other domains. If social media is indeed different, the question is what can be done to go people to consider information from outside of their bubble. Our data for Frg in detail will hopefully also permit u.s.a. to show how exactly online hate on Facebook is transmitted in practice.

Illustration credit: zixia/Alamy Photo

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Source: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/05/18/how-trump%E2%80%99s-nativist-tweets-overlap-anti-muslim-and-anti-latino-hate-crimes

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