Study: 10K Racial Slurs Are Posted on Twitter Every Day

Researchers at the think tank Demos recently analyzed nearly127,000 English tweets during a 9-day stretch and found that racism accounted for 5-10% of all tweets sent. They estimate that 10,000 racist statements are made on Twitter every single day. However, they noted that in the vast majority of cases (about 70%), the slurs were not being used in an intentionally abusive manner. The author of the report told The Daily Mail, “’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.” The researchers noted that despite the prevalence of racial slurs, there were even fewer threats of violence on the micro-blogging site. The report said, “’We estimate that, at the very most, fewer than 100 tweets are sent each day which might be interpreted as threatening any kind of violence or offline action” …