Cyber Hate Speech on Social Neighborhoods: An Examination of Temporal and Spatial Dynamics of Paris Attacks

• In Event: Crime and Place: Neighborhood Context and Crime

Abstract

There is increasing interest in using “big data” to describe social dynamics in general and crime events in particular. Thus, social networks have become an important source of data for scientists that study human behavior. From some time ago to the present, more and more research studies avail themselves of the huge amount of data available at websites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, instead of the traditional surveys and interviews. Moreover the development of web-based services that combine spatial coordinates and data allows us to identify geographically Twitter posts and photos, thereby connecting cyberspace to physical space. The Paris attacks was a disruptive event that generated an important public reaction in social networks, and created the opportunity to study the phenomenon of violent communication and hate messages in Twitter in physical and cyber space. In the days after the attack, a sample of 259.333 tweets was collected. This study employs geolocated social media data to identify spatiotemporally tagged tweets patterns through qualitative and quantitative analysis. The results show that disruptive events are followed by communications that show spatial temporal and textual patterns clearly identifiable; this allows the proposal of a methodology to identify those messages that contain hate speech

Author

• Fernando Miró Llinares, Universidad Miguel Hernández de Elche