Climate, there is a link between extreme temperatures and hate speech

Temperature changes accompanied by offensive thoughts and more aggressive tweets:this is how extreme climates influence people's behavior.

It's not just our impression:on extremely hot days, thehumor of people changes and becomes unpredictable.According to a study published by the scientific journal Lancet planetary health, However, the influence of the external temperature would also have repercussions on our online behavior, influencing the amount of hatred present online.

Link between hate speech and climate

For hate speech we all mean that type of aggressive and discriminatory messages, tweets, comments and videos, with racist, homotransphobic or otherwise offensive content towards minorities or LGBT people.To verify the correlation between climate and this type of content, the working group ofInstitute for climate impact research of Potsdam, Germany, led by the analyst Leonie Wenz, collected approximately four billion tweets from the United States, identified based on their geolocation.The selected messages were sent between May 2014 and May 2020.Once they obtained the messages, Wenz and his team used artificial intelligence to scan the mass of tweets, searching for a wide range of English words and formulas deemed offensive, racist and discriminatory.The results appear to draw a strong link between extreme temperatures and the presence of hate speech online – or at least on Twitter, the social network chosen for this study.According to the analysis, in fact, the tweets that were sent on the days when temperatures exceeded 42 degrees centigrade in the US appeared to have 22 percent more offensive and racist words than average.Not only that:the trend seems fairly uniform across geography – from rural areas to wealthier suburbs – and income.The heat and drought therefore seem to be accompanied by a harshening of the tone in discussions on the internet.Even if it was not possible to analyze in depth the demographic or racial groups most "active" in creating offensive content, the study underlines that it is not difficult to understand who were the victims of these messages.Among all, black people and Hispanics, who in the United States are the main targets of hate speech.

With temperature changes, offensive content online increases

Something similar seems to also happen in the opposite direction, when the temperatures drop below zero, and here we see another increase in hate speech – although this time more measured:“only” 12.5 percent.What causes these peaks are the thermal changes more than absolute temperatures:in warmer areas, in fact, the increase in this type of content on warmer days is more measured.According to the study's authors, this means that increases in offensive tweets "are dependent on the temperatures we are accustomed to."According to the authors of the study, this link between extreme temperatures and hate speech will become increasingly closer as the years go by due to the global warming and meteorological events and extreme climate phenomena.“The expression of hate online could increase in the future,” becoming one of the most notable political and cultural effects of the climate ahead.