All I know about Humboldt State is that it's a stoner campus–wait, that's Chico State. Or is it Sonoma State? To be honest with you, I have no idea who or what is a Humboldt State. But they've gained in Internet prominence in the past couple of years for something called the Geography of Hate, an aggregation of tweets containing racist and homophobic slurs then mapped out to show a concentration of hate based on geography.
When I first saw the report, I noticed our beloved Orange County had no seeming ranking on the list. But I overlooked the fine print, because it turns out we're the capital of racist and homophobic tweets in America–POUND SAND, ALABAMA.
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The cause for the discrepancy? “Hateful tweets were aggregated to the county level and then normalized by the total number of tweets in each county,” the report states. “This then shows a comparison of places with disproportionately high amounts of a particular hate word relative to all tweeting activity. For example, Orange County, California has the highest absolute number of tweets mentioning many of the slurs, but because of its significant overall Twitter activity, such hateful tweets are less prominent and therefore do not appear as prominently on our map.”
In other words, there are many haters here, more haters per number than anywhere else in the country, but they're being increasingly drowned out by the Reconquista. Double win for us–and, as always, stay classy, OC!
Email: ga*******@oc******.com. Twitter: @gustavoarellano. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
