Anyone who has spent any time on social media will be aware of the prevalence of inflammatory and hate-filled language.  Is such behavior contained within social media however, or does it spread into real-world actions.  That was the question posed by a recent study from Cardiff University via their HateLab project.

The analysis suggests that there is indeed a strong likelihood that hate speech online will bleed into increased instances of hate crime offline.  The finding came from assessing data from both Twitter and official crime data from London over an eight-month period to explore any correlation between the two.

The data shows that as the number of ‘hate tweets’ rise in a particular location, so too do the instances of racially or religiously motivated crimes in an area.  The authors hope that their work may lead to smarter policing as police forces begin to use social media data to better predict instances of hate crime in their jurisdiction.

“This is the first UK study to demonstrate a consistent link between Twitter hate speech targeting race and religion and racially and religiously aggravated offenses that happen offline,” the researchers say.  “Previous research has already established that major events can act as triggers for hate acts. But our analysis confirms this association is present even in the absence of such events.”

Migrating to the physical world

The researchers believe that their findings are a clear example of how hate speech online can easily migrate to the physical world, which given that they identified nearly 300,000 hateful tweets during the eight-month study period is worrying indeed.

The data suggests that this translated into over 6,500 racially and religiously aggravated crimes, with geographic data suggesting there was a clear correlation between the location of the Twitter users and the incidences of crime in the physical world.

“Until recently, the seriousness of online hate speech has not been fully recognized. These statistics prove that activities which unfold in the virtual world should not be ignored,” the researchers conclude.  “The data used in this study were collected at a time before the social media giants introduced strict hate speech policies. But rather than disappear, we would expect hate speech to be displaced to more underground platforms. In time, our data science solutions will allow us to follow the hate wherever it goes.”