Online discrimination linked to real-life hate crimes
It may be tempting to think that what happens online stays there. But by analyzing five years of Twitter posts from 100 U.S. cities, researchers at New York University have found that where race- and ethnicity-based discrimination was more common online, there were also more hate crimes in real life. … It is unrealistic to separate these online and offline forms of discrimination, according to Rumi Chunara, assistant professor of computer science at NYU [Tandon]. “It’s becoming so pervasive. The internet is becoming more and more a part of our life — it’s part of the environment that we are immersed in," she said.