Rumi Chunara, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the School of Global Public Health (GPH) and computer science and engineering at the Tandon School of Engineering, is studying the increasingly porous border between the real and virtual worlds. Chunara and her colleagues compared FBI records of racial, ethnic, and national-origin hate crimes in 100 US cities between 2011 and 2016 with hate speech on Twitter during the same time frame. “We found that the cities that had the greatest amount of hate crimes correlated with the greatest number of online discriminatory tweets,” says Stephanie Cook, a GPH assistant professor of biostatistics and social and behavioral sciences. Cook and Chunara emphasize that correlation is not causation. However, “this study contributes to showing that what’s online has implications,” says Chunara. “When there are nefarious things in the real world, we should consider the virtual world as a potential factor.” —Lindsy Van Gelder • Illustration by John W. Tomac
No comments:
Post a Comment