Reading Time: 1 minute Students may wonder if hateful tweets can increase crime. Recent research has shown that there is a correlation. Cornell University’s study proved this connection. Researchers looked at over 500 million tweets between 2011-2016. If you were wondering how they could do that, you’ll be relieved when you find out that artificial intelligence was used to assist them.
They first classified tweets into 2 groups: “targeted”, and “self-narration”.
Targeted tweets are defined as:
…a tweet against a person or property that is motivated in whole or part by bias against race or ethnicity or national origin
Tweets that self-narrate were defined as containing
…any of the pronouns in the first person: I, me and mine, my, we, our, ours We also required absolute majority of the first-person pronouns to be used over third- and second-person pronouns.
Tweets that are self-narrated were tweets in the context of discrimination or hate crimes.
The result?
We found that more targeted, discriminatory tweets posted in a city related to a higher number of hate crimes….There was a negative relationship between the proportion of race/ethnicity/national-origin-based discrimination tweets that were self-narrations of experiences and the number of crimes
If you are interested in asking students about correlations, the one that exists between targeted tweets of hate crimes and self-narrative tweets is positive. The correlation between hate crimes and self-narrative tweets is negative.
It is difficult to determine the causality. Is hate crime a result of targeted tweets? But a good discussion could be based on whether or not correlations are useful.
Is it worth keeping an eye on these tweets?
What should you do if there is an increase in your income?
This could be a new tool for crime prevention …?