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I am sure we all know that feeling of getting more irritable when temperatures rise. Well, now we have some fascinating research to show that that irascibility is also measurable in the amount of hate speech online.
We may assume that hate speech is simply the language of a number of opinionated and disagreeable folk. Sure, it is, but this shows that, seemingly, local temperatures magnify this effect.
So, what was this fascinating study?
This was conducted by Annika Stechemesser, et al. of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research by analysing over 4 billion tweets in the US using AI algorithms. From this they identified about 75 million English phrased hate tweets. They were then mapped to local temperatures and lo and behold a correlation was found.
What they found is that there is feel good window which corresponds to the minimum of hate tweets. That feel good window is between 12 and 21°C with the absolute minimum between 15 and 18°C.
Temperatures either above or below, interestingly, led to an increase in hate tweets. Temperatures above 30°C are consistently linked to an increase in hate tweets across climate zones and socioeconomic differences including income, religious beliefs, or political preferences.
