Karsten Muller and Carlo Schwarz

When individuals of influence, including political candidates and heads of state utilise such words, the effect can exist especially pronounced.

In the run-upwards to, and since his ballot equally President of the Usa, Donald Trump's words have attracted a lot of attending. Many commentators and activists have charged that Trump's rhetoric has fueled hate crimes in the Us against minorities. Until recently, many individuals voicing such concerns pointed to loftier-profile individual cases, rather than systematic data. At present that's changing as new research is emerging.

Hatewatch spoke with Karsten Muller and Carlo Schwarz, ii researchers at the University of Warwick in the Uk who accept been studying the touch of hate speech on social media and how that translates to hate crimes in the real world. Muller and Schwarz discuss their latest study, "Making America Hate Again? Twitter and Hate Criminal offense Under Trump"

Their study used Twitter and FBI detest crimes data to come to a stark decision: hate crimes against Muslims and Latinos occurred shortly subsequently Trump fabricated disparaging tweets about Muslims and Latinos. Moreover these anti-Muslim and anti-Latino detest crimes were physically concentrated in parts of the land where there is high Twitter usage.

Karsten and Carlo, tin you lot give usa an overview of your research interests and your recent written report on President Trump'due south tweets and Muslim hate crimes?

Carlo: Nosotros are economists working in slightly unlike areas, but we both have an involvement in what people normally telephone call political economic system. What we try to do is to apply modern quantitative methods to study political outcomes and the role of social media. In our virtually recent study, nosotros discover that the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the U.S. has increased quite markedly under Trump. We prove that this increase started with the start of Trump's presidential campaign and is predominately driven by U.S. counties where a large fraction of the population uses Twitter. The data as well prove that this increment cannot be easily explained by differences in demographics, votes for Republicans, criminal offense rates, media consumption or other factors.

Karsten: The 2nd thing we do in the paper is to wait at the correlation between Trump'south tweets almost Islam-related topics and hate crimes that target Muslims. And what nosotros find is that this correlation is very stiff after Trump had started his entrada, but basically zero earlier. We also find that when Trump tweets about Muslims, hate crimes increases disproportionately in those areas where many people utilize Twitter. Information technology is too of import to note that hate crimes confronting Muslims were not systematically college in those areas during previous presidencies, so it seems unlikely we are but capturing the fact that people in some areas dislike Muslims more than in others.

Are you claiming Trump'due south tweets take acquired hate crimes?

Karsten: We are very careful not to make that merits in the newspaper because I think it is extremely difficult to tell based on our information. Later on all, nosotros are not looking at a controlled laboratory experiment so there is always room for other drivers. But if you look at the results, some point in that direction, for example that Trump's tweets are particularly correlated with hereafter hate crimes in counties where many people use Twitter.

Carlo: A uncomplicated thing to do hither is to call up about what alternative stories could explain our findings. For case, one could imagine that people who Trump himself follows (such as Trick & Friends or Alex Jones) are the real driving cistron. Or that people take recently become more than radicalized in rural areas, or where the bulk votes Republican. Merely a careful await at the information reveals that Twitter usage is in fact lower in counties where people tend to vote Republican and in rural areas, and we use some survey information to bear witness that Twitter users more often than not prefer CNN or MSNBC over Pull a fast one on News. These factors likewise cannot easily explain why the increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes should occur precisely with Trump's entrada start and not before or after.

Karsten: So overall, we take our findings as suggestive of a potential connectedness between social media and hate crimes. But at the end of the solar day, readers have to make up their own minds.

What were some of the other key findings that stood out with regard to Muslims?

Karsten: What really stands out to me is just how stiff the correlation of Trump'south tweets is with time to come anti-Muslim hate crimes. So, for instance, i might exist worried that Trump simply tweets about Muslims when people are mostly very interested in everything related to Islam. Merely what we detect is that Trump'due south tweets are correlated with hate crimes even if nosotros first even if we control for the effect of general attention to Islam-related topics (as measured past Google Searches). Although there are other explanations, I also found information technology striking that you meet a spike in hate crimes against Muslims in the calendar week of the Presidential election, but only in areas where many people use Twitter.

Carlo: Another matter I institute quite interesting is that Trump's tweets near Muslims are non correlated with other types of hate crimes. The reason this is of import is considering one could easily imagine that people just happen to be especially aroused at minorities in some weeks compared to others, and that Trump is only part of that. Simply if this was true, we would also expect there to exist more than hate crimes against Latinos, or LGBTQ people or African Americans, which does non seem to be the case at all. We too do not detect any show that other types of hate crimes increased in areas with many Twitter users effectually Trump's entrada start — except a small shift for anti-Latino crimes.

Your written report likewise noticed a statistically significant association between anti-Latino tweets and hate crimes. Why do you think in that location has been a similar, but less robust set of results?

Karsten: When we started our written report, nosotros only had data on hate crimes until the terminate of 2022 — after Trump'southward campaign started in June 2015, merely before his ballot. And what you lot see in the information is a very strong correlation between Trump'south tweets about Latinos and subsequent anti-indigenous hate crimes starting with the beginning of his entrada until December 2015, while there is virtually no correlation before. After the 2022 information were released, nosotros found that the effect becomes substantially weaker from around mid-2016 onwards.

Carlo: When nosotros looked at that more closely — and we think that is consistent with the media coverage during that time as well — Trump toned downwardly his anti-Latino rhetoric quite a lot in the run-up to the campaign. In that location was, for example, his tweet with a taco bowl on Cinco de Mayo 2016. If you go through Trump's Twitter feed in the pre-election period, you will encounter only a handful tweets nigh Latinos at all during that time. And while hate crimes against Latinos remained slightly elevated in areas with many Twitter users during that time, that means the correlation with the timing of Trump's tweets became weaker. A potential interpretation is that information technology is not that the results are so much weaker than those for anti-Muslim hate crime, information technology's just that Trump essentially stopped tweeting negative things most Latinos.

How does this study compare and contrast with your earlier investigation into the online activities of the far-correct and nativist political political party Culling for Federal republic of germany (AfD)?

Carlo: In our study on Germany, we found a very similar correlation between posts about refugees on the AfD's Facebook folio and crimes targeting refugees. We look at these two studies as complementary, even though they use somewhat unlike methodologies. In the High german setting, nosotros have very granular data on internet and Facebook outages that we can use equally "quasi-experiments" to get at the causal upshot of social media. And what we found there is that, even if you compare neighboring cities, refugees are more likely to be victims of violent attacks where many people use social media, particularly when tensions are high. Importantly, these are relative effects.

What is different for the U.S. is that nosotros notice this link between Trump'south campaign starting time and the increase in the absolute number of hate crimes confronting precisely those minorities in his verbal crosshairs (e.m. Muslims and Latinos), making the link past using Trump's tweets. and FBI hate crimes dataset. By using the FBI hate crimes statistics, it besides allow usa to compare the contempo change in detest crimes to those under presidents since 1990s.

For civically conscious users of the internet, what are the most important takeaways and implications from your research?

Carlo:  On one mitt, our goal is to suggest that politicians should not ignore social media, because the correlation with real-life hate crimes seems to be pretty strong. We think that this discussion should be taken seriously. On the other manus, nosotros desire to caution confronting whatever attempts at censorship. Some countries have an outright ban on certain social media platforms, and these states are usually not known for their open up political soapbox and liberty of oral communication. The claiming is to come up upward with solutions that can help protect citizens from vehement extremists without imposing drastic limits on freedom of expression. In the terminate, the people who actually commit hate crimes are the ones nosotros have to hold accountable.

Karsten: I want to give a somewhat different perspective here. Many people talk nearly a potential "dark side" of social media, but the number of studies that take really looked at this issue with information is surprisingly small-scale. One of the well-nigh important takeaways for me is that as a society we should be spending more than time and resource to support researchers working on this area. It is conspicuously something that many people intendance about, and it matters tremendously for policymakers as well.

What practice you lot programme to do next in your research?

Karsten: We retrieve a big open question is to come up up with more physical ways of measuring whether "echo chambers" on social media actually exist, and how they differ from echo chambers in other domains. If social media is indeed dissimilar, the question is what can be done to get people to consider information from exterior of their bubble. Our information for Germany in particular will hopefully also allow u.s. to show how exactly online hate on Facebook is transmitted in practice.

Analogy credit: zixia/Alamy Photograph

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Source: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/05/18/how-trump%E2%80%99s-nativist-tweets-overlap-anti-muslim-and-anti-latino-hate-crimes

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