If we’ve learned one thing from this presidential election, it’s that we’re a nation divided by, and overrun with, hatred. No matter your skin color, gender, race, sexual orientation, physical appearance, or any other attribute, some segment of our society has a pronounced bias against you, and they’re not afraid to announce it on social media. Hell, some of the leaders of the presidential pack seem like they’re running their whole campaign on a steady stream of rage and hate, a particularly ugly methodology that one wouldn’t expect to work as well as it has been.
Blustery politicians aside, much of this hatred, especially on social media, is perpetuated under false names. Nothing like anonymity and a world-spanning platform to bring out the very best in people, right? But just because we can’t point fingers at the the exact trolls who perpetuate the web’s ugly undercurrent, we can use a variety of tools to search their public posts, analyzing what is said where, and narrowing down at least which parts of our country think that “making America great again” involves racial prejudice, misogyny, or some other form of base intolerance. This is exactly what apartment location start-up Abodo did, scanning millions of tweets from June 2014 through December 2015 for a laundry list of racial slurs, derogatory slang terms, and more to compile a ranking of where our most ignorant tendencies show up with the greatest frequency, and where we’re the most politically correct.
The results are surprising in some areas, less-so in others. For example, Louisiana has the most anti-black tweets as a state, which sadly isn’t shocking. Yet the “honor” for most anti-black tweets from a single city goes by a wide margin to Baltimore, Maryland, which has publicly had its share of race-based problems in the past year. Conversely, the state with the most anti-Hispanic sentiments on Twitter is California, with the harshest city being Bakersfield.