Evaluating associations between area-level Twitter-expressed negative racial sentiment, hate crimes, and residents' racial prejudice in the United States.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The objective of the current study is to investigate whether an area-level measure of racial sentiment derived from Twitter data is associated with state-level hate crimes and existing measures of racial prejudice at the individual-level.

Methods

We collected 30,977,757 tweets from June 2015-July 2018 containing at least one keyword pertaining to specific groups (Asians, Arabs, Blacks, Latinos, Whites). We characterized sentiment of each tweet (negative vs all other) and averaged at the state-level. These racial sentiment measures were merged with other measures based on: hate crime data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program; implicit and explicit racial bias indicators from Project Implicit; and racial attitudes questions from General Social Survey (GSS).<

SUBMITTER: Nguyen TT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7901034 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature