Twitter and racism

The media has been excitedly discussing all of the vitriolic tweets that were published following the recent Miss America contest, in which the winner was a woman of South Asian (Indian) descent. It seems that after she won, there were many racist tweets that the media felt obliged to note. I don’t quite understand the media’s fascination with this behavior — given the millions of tweets that are published each day, I would expect that a certain percentage of them would be hateful in some way or another. WIthout knowing the percentage of hateful tweets (as compared to the overall number), it is difficult to know how important/relevant any of this is. And by focusing on this behavior, news outlets are reinforcing it. Let’s move on.

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