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Study finds Edmonton, Calgary heavy on racist tweets

Article Origin

Author

By Darlene Chrapko Sweetgrass Writer EDMONTON

Volume

21

Issue

10

Year

2014

Throughout the months of June, July and August in 2013, Irfan Chaudry, a University of Alberta sociology PhD candidate, tracked tweets in six major cities, including Calgary and Edmonton, and discovered that racism is being expressed through the use of Twitter.

“In Canada, we sweep it under the rug and don’t like to talk about it,” he said. “Twitter provides a different avenue to understand it or to express it.”

On his website, twitterracism.com, Chaudry describes his methodology. “The words chosen represented the most common racist terms associated with specific racialized groups,” he noted. Chaudry was surprised to discover that the term “Native,” not usually a racist word, was used negatively on twitter, so he included it as a key term of the data set.  He used the social media platform Hootsuite to search for tweets that contained racist words used in a negative context, including “Native” and “Natives.”

Although Chaudry admits that his sample is small, consisting of 750 tweets out of the 2,000 he read over a three-month period, it is telling and has raised interesting discussion. The highest number of negative uses of the word “Native,” emerged in cities with a higher number of Aboriginal residents, Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg. The results resonate with public perception studies, says Chaudry, citing a 2010 Environics study on urban Aboriginals that agreed that people from  Alberta faced the most discrimination. In Edmonton, of the 60 tweets deemed racist, 27 referenced “Natives.”  Of the 62 tweets considered racist in Calgary, 30 were directed at “Natives.” In many instances people were responding to a physical situation on a bus or transit, for example.

Chaudry concludes that heritage limits inclusion.

“People don’t understand how the online and offline worlds are coalescing and it’s difficult to separate the two,” said Chaudry.

Tweeting gives a false sense of anonymity as people are behind a phone or computer. “You don’t see the person that you’re communicating with and the person doesn’t know what’s being said about them.”

Tweeting appears to create a safe space for individuals to showcase different types of hate speech, he adds. Many people hold the view that they are entitled to express their opinion as freedom of speech. Or they don’t understand the full implication of their actions. “What’s the big deal? I just tweeted it, they say.”

Chaudry believes people need to take responsibility for what they say on twitter. Twitter is engaging more mechanisms to allow people to report abuse, but abusers find different ways around it, by creating another profile or another account, he says.

That these issues are emerging has a positive aspect. “People are openly talking about issues of race, both positive and negative. Discussions are happening and creating more awareness of the issue.” 

Chaudry believes he has only scratched the surface and will delve deeper in his next project in which he plans to track and analyze the missing and murdered women hashtag across the country.