h/t Dr. Willie Soon; According to a study, hate speech increases on social media when temperatures rise above 30°C (86F).
Climate Change Is Making People Angrier Online
Hate speech increases on social media when temperatures rise above 30°C (86F), new research says.
By Laura Millan Lombrana
13 September 2022 at 20:47 GMT+10Climate change is making us angrier online. A lot angrier.
Hateful comments spike on social media when temperatures rise above 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research have found.
“It’s an indicator of how well people can adapt to high temperatures,” said Annika Stechemesser, lead author of the study published in The Lancet Planetary Health earlier this month. “If temperatures go too hot or too cold, we found that there’s an increase in online hate speech, no matter the socioeconomic differences, religion or political beliefs.”
Global warming of about 1.1°C on average since pre-industrial times has unleashed all sorts of extreme weather events across the world. This summer, drought and a string of heat waves hit Europe, China and the US. For humans, heat is associated with psychiatric hospitalizations, increased rates of suicide and more domestic violence, according to research.
And aggressive behavior online has been linked to violence offline too. Incensed posts have led to more violence toward minorities, including mass shootings, lynchings and ethnic cleansing, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank.
…
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-13/climate-change-is-making-people-angrier-online
The findings of the study;
Temperature impacts on hate speech online: evidence from 4 billion geolocated tweets from the USA
Annika Stechemesser, MSc , Prof Anders Levermann, PhD , Leonie Wenz, PhD
Open Access Published:September, 2022DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00173-5
The prevalence of hate tweets was lowest at moderate temperatures (12 to 21°C) and marked increases in the number of hate tweets were observed at hotter and colder temperatures, reaching up to 12·5% (95% CI 8·0–16·5) for cold temperature extremes (–6 to –3°C) and up to 22·0% (95% CI 20·5–23·5) for hot temperature extremes (42 to 45°C). Outside of the moderate temperature range, the hate tweets also increased as a proportion of total tweeting activity. The quasi-quadratic shape of the temperature–hate tweet curve was robust across varying climate zones, income quartiles, religious and political beliefs, and both city-level and state-level aggregations. However, temperature ranges with the lowest prevalence of hate tweets were centred around the local temperature mean and the magnitude of the increases in hate tweets for hot and cold temperatures varied across the climate zones.
Read more: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(22)00173-5/fulltext
Interestingly the study finding doesn’t seem to say quite what the Conversation said. The study finding appears to be that hate tweets are lowest when temperatures are closest to the mean temperature for the region, which suggests people feel least distressed when temperatures feel normal for their locale. The variation in intensity of this effect in different climate zones is also intriguing.
Even if the study methodology and conclusions are correct, and that is a big if, this does not appear to imply global warming would cause everyone to become angrier. Global warming is gradual on a human timescale. Most people who move to warm places like Florida don’t stay permanently angry, they adapt – just as people would adapt to any gradual changes in the local climate. And if they feel too warm, they can just switch on the air conditioner, providing energy remains affordable.
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Did they also study the poster’s proximity to airport runways and air conditioner vents?
Fun with anagrams, I guess. You could call it the Urban Hate Island Effect.
My theory is Crooked Joey Biden is causing anger….and he is a very angry old man.
I wish I had said that!
My god.
It just gets stupider and stupider.
And depraved. NPR says children are never too you to learn about anal.
Nor are they too young to go through gender reassignment surgery.
I would suspect that is where the anger originates, dealing with these stupid people.
Oh I don’t know – the ramping up of the climate change scam occurred entirely within the modern period of warming so is purely an artefact of overly warm, angry idiots. On the other hand, the report is from PIK so not a credible source by it’s track record!
odd. I get angry when it drops below -20F. couple days every winter.
Winter pisses me off every year when I write the heating check. Ho Ho Ho.Yeah, right.
My first question was who classified tweets as “hate”.
Having moved from Northern California, where the typical summer temperature was too cool to raise most melons, to South Central Texas, where it is normally 90 F plus in the summer, I did not notice any more irate people in Texas. Rather fewer, in fact.
Maybe Texans can afford electricity to run their air conditioners…
I’m afraid that’s going to change real soon, Eric, as the cost of the February 2021 power debacle becomes clearer. Nothing is being announced before the election because of the reaction it is going to generate (no pun intended).
I just got locked in for 3 years.
If this is true, I may hop to another plan just as this manifests. It costs me $100 t jump plans.
That was something that I was curious about too. Turns out they’re using AI to categorize the tweets using the UN definition, which is quite broad (“any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor”).
Of particular interest so far is looking at Section 1.g of their Supplementary appendix of the underlying paper. Of all the “hate tweets” they identified using the AI, they manually reviewed 1000 of them. What they define as “hate speech” in their manual review seems mostly to be certain demographics using their particular vernacular.
They look to conclude that ~70% of the identified tweets are actual “hate speech”. Though, I think if you actually looked at them as a rational person and took into account the socially acceptable language within the sub-cultures in which the tweets occur, then the amount of actual hate speech (inasmuch as there is such a thing) would be incredibly small.
They discuss this a little in their Discussion section, but seem to be mostly dismissive of the effects:
“Although in general it is impossible to accurately classify all hate speech due to its many incarnations, subtlety,75 sarcasm, and context dependence, the robustness checks we conducted on the quality of the dataset suggest that the data present a representative sample of hateful discourse on Twitter. However, some of the expressions included in tweets have a different connotation based on the cultural context in which they are used. Specifically, some proportion of the tweets classified as hate contain the N-word with the spelling variant ending in “a” which has, in contrast to the spelling with “er”, according to some sources been reappropriated as a type of endearment in some communities.76 However, the use of the word and its variants remains highly controversial. In the examples observed in our data (appendix p 7), the context is typically aggressive and derogatory. However, we cannot be sure that all instances in the dataset containing this particular slur are genuinely hateful.”
I’m not a tweeter (twit?) but I get the impression that, aside from the bots trying to steal identities, Twitter is mostly about hating the other side. Seems like at least 50% has been “we hate Trump and everyone who voted for him”.
I am not a twat (one who tweets) either. Twitter might be the worst method of trying to actually determine the real sentiment of a population. It’s a cesspool of narcissists. Jordan Peterson wrote an interesting article on it called Why Twitter is Insane back in July (he reads it, under the same title on YouTube without needing to get past the Telegraph’s paywall).
But it calls into serious question many of the premises of this study, which they crayfish around with in trying to support their definition of “hate speech.” A term often used by the Left to intimidate those who disagree with their faulty logic on just about every disputable political issue.
People are just too soft these days. I just try to laugh this nonsense off.
Mark, you actually took the time to read this “study?” You need to get a soothing hobby.
I suggest skeet or sporting clays. It’s not that soothing but you get to make loud bangs and break stuff.
Its more fun to practice with your concealed carry sub-compact high-capacity pistol at the range. You get the loud bangs, but just punch holes in paper. Out in the desert, however, you get the satisfaction of destroying stuff.
The real game, though, was combat in Vietnam. The targets shot back and sometimes hit you. Bummer. Lots of cripples at the local VA hospital. I volunteered there until my wife’s health required my attention.
Bless you for volunteering.
Thank you.
If rap music was tweeted it would be mostly classed as racist and misogynist even though the actual song wasn’t.
I have a feeling they need to look at a larger sample to test their AI.
Some guys were playing rap music at work one day… I decided to recite the lyrics to the song they were listening to to them… the look on their faces was priceless.
Leftists have a nasty habit of defining anything they disagree with as hate speech.
And it’s also entirely subjective. To the point that in the UK, if you say something online that someone else subjectively feels offended by, you can be visited by the police and convicted without any trial of a “non-crime hate incident”, something that will come up on a police background check, like when you apply for a job, etc.
With that onus upon everyone, why does anyone in the UK have a twitter account?
Tweeting that the sky is blue is bound to offend someone.
HOW DARE YOU!
🤣 🤣 See?
Wait a sec. Someone is knocking at the door.
“Well hello, Officers. What seems to be the problem?”
In the land of free speech how can there be hate speech? Rudeness should not be illegal.
I guess that’s where ‘Hot under the collar’ comes from.
The undoing of aspirations for ‘success’ in life imo stem from too many university graduates of fringe-relevance studies desperately trying to produce something, anything of relevance to the lives of ordinary punters, dutifully reported by other graduates of fringe “journalism” courses, which of course the increasingly irrelevant MSM publishes immediately without thought.
Epic failures all around.
I suggest they watch the 1957 movie “12 Angry Men”
That was 65 years ago!
What a crock!
(Is that “hate” speech?)
Only against pickles and sauerkraut, James.
How do they tell where the allegedly angry commentators are located?
Probably by logging the IP addresses that they get from their ISP when they log on. It’s not going to be extremely accurate, but might locate you to a town/suburb level.
You could spoof your location by using a VPN, but those people just wouldn’t show up in their data. Basically, someone (either private enterprise or government) can get almost all information about what you do online, including where you are when you do it.
They ask Twitter, Google, Apple, Microsoft etc.
That’s my question too. The two answers prior to mine assume Twitter FaceBook etc convert the IP address to a rough location. Do studies like this actually get such bulk data from the social media companies?
Is it not the case that most people allow their location to be available? I constantly get requests on commercial web sites that say something like “allow your location to be used?” because, for one reason, large retailers, to some extent, offer different merchandise in different places. Most certainly, though I make every effort to keep such information offline, it is evident from search results that my location is used to decide what results to present (depending upon the type of information sought).
The social media companies certainly have my IP address and a rough idea of my geographic question. The question is, how do these researchers claim to get that information so they can get the local temperature? Do the social media companies include the rough geographic location with bulk data dumps which are available to the researchers?
When I fire up MapQuest from my work account, I show up as being located at corporate headquarters, which is thousands of miles away from where my desk is actually located.
climate: Figuratively, of mental or moral atmosphere, from 1660s.
Low point in temperatures – high point in hate.
So, all is sweetness and light in the wintertime?
I hadn’t noticed!
Note the bit about “according to the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank”
I’m trying to think where I’ve heard that name before …
Members of the Council on Foreign Relations – Wikipedia
Would that be cabin fever with an internet connection?
Now is the Winter of our … content.
Said literally no-one ever.
Not much mention of discounted camping equipment either – amazing how that one line has seen so many deliberate misquotes over the years.
Does the lead author get a Ph.D. for that?
I think everyone at PIK has them – the ‘Potsdam hilarious Diploma’ is a comedy award for the most ridiculous and absurd climate change related routine.
The parade of useful idiots never stops.
I agree with these knuckleheads, every time we get a heat wave all the crackpots come out of the woodwork blaming fossil fuels. That makes me angry. I can handle the heat, stupidity, not so much.
And every full moon. And every time there’s a big public event. And every time somebody points a news camera their way. Lets face it, there are a lot of crazy people out there just waiting for any excuse to act up!
Hard to separate terms these days. There are a LOT of emotion drivers at work.
How can one trust people who say things like: “Global warming of about 1.1°C on average since pre-industrial times has unleashed all sorts of extreme weather events across the world.” Weather was much more severe when it was colder. We now live in a much more equitable climate with fewer natural disasters and famine events.
I hate it when climate change fanatics start off a supposed scientific article with their statement of faith. They may be thinking like the Nazis that repeating a lie enough will eventually convince people – it’s been true to a point so far but people are starting to see the lie as the predictions get more and more ridiculous and the weather is just the same old same old.
That reminds me of a story I heard about the code breakers during WWII.
It seems that loyal Germans started and ended pretty much every communication with Seig Heil.
Once the code breakers noticed this trend, they would first check for any solution that would give then Seig Heil in those locations. Made breaking the codes a lot easier.
If correlation was causation then social media causes global climate change.
Well consider the amount of CO2 spewing energy required to power the massive databases of unsocial media accounts and it probably does
Oh! Sorry, Twatter, Farcebook, Instacrap etc are powered by unicorn farts
Clown scientists are now running the climate mental asylum!
Isn’t obvious from their own data that the hate tweets drop off dramatically after temperatures reach the mid to high 30s, especially for the cold temp areas who are least likely to be used to the higher temps?
The hate tweets might start rising with temps as their fingers thaw after shoveling snow but we northerners get very chill and friendly once temps get properly hot and the skimpy outfits come out.
Are there more racists and other haters in Northern Europe or on the beaches in Southern Italy?
More hate and violence in Chicago or Miami, or Los Angeles for that matter? How about compared to Rio de Janeiro?
Wasn’t it a mayor of a town in Southern Italy that decreed that no overweight or ‘ugly’ women were allowed to go onto the beaches there? Does that constitute hate speech?
Is there any recognized, objective measure of “hate speech”. Or is anything that offends someone’s sensitivities “hate speech”?
since the global average hasn’t moved in 20 years Climate Change won’t be causing more hate …
Easy to prove if true. People living in tropical climates would be in a an extreme state of continual fury, while those in cool climates would always be calm and loving.
So that’s why we witnessed widespread world peace during the Little Ice Age(-:
Previous to that, during The Medieval Warm Period, the world was dominated by hatred and anger! There were constant widespread wars caused by evil people, who were driven by the
very warm temperatures.
As soon as the global temperature dropped below the anger tipping point, at the start of the Little Ive Age, all wars ended and people from every country……race, creed, religion and gender, hugged each other, held hands and broke out into an uncontrolled chorus of Kumbia. 2
Kumbia = Kumbaya (my Lord)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_eWUOYiWVo
Who also sang this awesome song before?
Considering Twitter was only founded in 2006, I’d like to see the data from the early 20th century before taking this
propagandastudy seriouslyNo, what’s making people angrier online is the algorithms more of the one-sided drivel they usually read instead of a balanced view of the world
AND THAT REALLY PEES ME OFF!!!