Or, at least, where they’re the most open about displaying their antisocial views.

The picture doesn’t look good for the Eastern states, although admittedly the bulk of the population is there as well. Areas in Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, and Alabama show up bright red on the map, as do areas in more central states Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota.

The map is part of a larger project, called the Geography of Hate, by Humboldt State professor Dr. Monica Stephens. The data that forms the map comes from an analysis of every tweet posted between June 2012 and April 2013 that contained at least one of 10 designated “hate words,” including dyke, fag, chink, gook, wetback, and cripple.

Source: Hate Map

California seems relatively hate-free

But while the original list of tweets was generated by a machine, every single one of the 150,000 tweets containing one of the target words was individually examined by undergraduate students. As the project description states:

Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing “hate words” as “negative,” this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

To protect the identity of potentially racist, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted Twitter users, the tweets were aggregated up to the county level, and counties with high levels of hate speech were colored red on the map. Areas with moderate levels — though still higher than the national average — are varying shades of blue, and unshaded areas were below the national average.

Smaller towns seem to have a higher incidence of hate speech — in Virginia, for example, Palmyra is more hateful on Twitter than Richmond. And in Louisiana, New Orleans and Baton Rouge are less hateful than smaller towns nearby.

Image credits: Geography of Hate

A French court ruled today that Twitter must identify its racist tweeters in France so they can be prosecuted, a decision that the social networking company is still evaluating.

This decision only applies to Twitter users in France, and it follows a slew of anti-Semitic tweets that violate that country’s laws on hate speech. In France, a nation with strict laws against anti-Semitism, no one has ever faced legal action for racist tweets.

French ministers are also facing pressure from anti-discrimination groups in France. In October, the French Union of Jewish Students (UEJF) launched a petition alleging that it is too difficult to report and quickly remove offensive content.

The offending tweets used the hashtag #unbonjuif, which means “a good Jew” and was created to ridicule the Jewish community. Two others — #SiMonFilsEstGay (#Ifmysonwasgay) and #unbonmusulman (#agoodMuslim) — also surfaced in October. According to the French newspaper Le Monde, #unbonjuif was the third most tweeted subject in France on Oct. 10, and continued to be used for several days.

Twitter said today in a statement that “we are currently reviewing the court’s decision.” The company’s lawyer, Alexandra Neri argued, in October that Twitter’s data on users was collected and stocked in California and the French justice system would need to appeal to American judges to hand over this data. But the company agreed to delete the offensive tweets.

During the case, Twitter’s lawyers also made the case that there are numerous different methods to report or flag abusive posts.

Twitter is weighing its commitment to user expression with the potential damage that such objectionable tweets may inflict. It is already making steps by proactively removing terms like “swastika” from its trending topics list, and as AFP reports, it has deleted some of the anti-Semitic tweets from October. Among them:

“A Good Jew can inflate his tire with his nose.”

Twitter’s official position is that it does not moderate content. But it can instantly remove potential child abuse and suspend accounts. Last year, in an unprecedented move, Twitter complied with a request by German authorities to block the account of a neo-Nazi group.

This case may test Twitter and other social networking site’s refusal to mediate content.

According to a Silicon Valley-based startup, there is a “big data solution” for one of the Internet’s most common afflictions.

Impermium, a Silicon Valley based venture-backed company that specializes in removing spam, has launched a new tool that that scans tens of millions of comments across the web. It spots highly offensive dirty words, and automatically removes them.

According to the company’s chief executive, Mark Risher, a tool like this is the first of its kind as algorithms have not traditionally been able to handle “internet speak” (coooooool, skilz, pr0n, and so on).

It took several months and the brainpower of leading data scientists to develop the technology. Spammers have evolved to become more sophisticated. “These are people that are actively trying to avoid getting caught,” said Risher in a phone interview with VentureBeat.

“Trolls and hackers and social spammers are changing their techniques to avoid detection,” he said.

As Facebook and Twitter reach their ascendancy, it has become more imperative that we find a way to remove spam. Recent data from security company Barracuda Labs sheds light on the extent of the problem. The study found that one in four Facebook users have received a virus or malware, often something posted to their public wall.

It’s a more profound problem for small businesses — the appearance of hate speech on their site is a reputation killer.

The competition

Rather than use an internal data services team, the company turned to Kaggle, a startup that hosts data-driven competitions.

From around the world, statisticians competed to build a tool that combines machine learning and natural language processing to root out malicious commentary. The winner received $7,000 — their solution was the most accurate with a false positive rate of less than one percent.

After posting the competition, the company received 154 submissions from contenders, and made some interesting discoveries about the nature of hate speech. In the words of Kaggle’s CEO, Anthony Goldbloom:

The key takeaways

• North Dakota is the most rambunctious state (6.4 percent of traffic is insulting) and Maine is the least (only 3.7 percent of traffic was considered spam or hate speech).
• People on the internet are more malicious than you might expect (“there was no difficulty finding enough insults”).
• Text with the word “mom” is more likely to constitute an insult.
• The word f*#k is a surprisingly poor indicator that text contains and insult. It is as often “f*#k yeah” as it is “f*#k you”.

According to Risher, it was more technically challenging than expected, namely because it takes a trained human eye to detect hate speech. For instance, the algorithm might flag a user for regurgitating lyrics to a popular rap song. Alternatively, it may fail to detect a malicious comment that is veiled in sarcasm.

“People are continuing to find new ways to insult each other,” said Risher. The self-described “spam Czar” left his job at Yahoo to focus on social media sites. In his former career, he was responsible for mitigating email spam.

Launching this week, the new tool called “Intelligent Content Protection” is already used by content-heavy sites like WordPress, Disqus and Livefyre. Pricing is flexible, but it’s about $2-3,000 per month, significantly less than the cost of a human editor.

Impermium launched in 2011, and has received funding from Charles River Ventures, Accel Partners, and others.

Image via Shutterstock