{"id":339602,"date":"2018-09-27T15:17:53","date_gmt":"2018-09-27T19:17:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=339602"},"modified":"2018-10-17T08:47:12","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T12:47:12","slug":"fan-hate-takes-aim-star-wars-diversity-data-science-339602","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/fan-hate-takes-aim-star-wars-diversity-data-science-339602\/","title":{"rendered":"Fan hate takes aim at Star Wars diversity"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bethany
Bethany Lacina, associate professor of political science.
(Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bethany Lacina<\/a>, an associate professor of political science at the URochester, has been very busy on Twitter recently. Analyzing posts that is\u2014not setting off late-night tweet storms.<\/p>\n

A Star Wars aficionado from elementary school onwards, Lacina used data science to study the prevalence of Twitter harassment<\/a> among the iconic movie franchise\u2019s fan base.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople were saying \u2018Look, everybody gets harassed on social media, that\u2019s just the way it works. Women and nonwhite people don\u2019t have it worse than anyone else.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Those kinds of comments galvanized Lacina, who joined the Rochester faculty in 2010, to start searching for hard data.<\/p>\n

A noticeable uptick in Twitter harassment and racist tweets followed the recent\u00a0The Last Jedi<\/em> movie, released in December 2017. Here, the Jedi order is placed in the hands of a young woman, while casting the franchise\u2019s first nonwhite female lead, Kelly Marie Tran<\/a>. The actress subsequently shut down her Instagram account, due to the flood of negative comments and personal online harassment.<\/p>\n

Twitter, just as other social media venues, has become politicized in the way its followers and members debate popular culture, Lacina notes. For her study, Lacina collected thousands of tweets from Star Wars fans, using computer algorithms to sort and categorize their Twitter conversations. She looked for offensive language, positive and negative attitudes, and outright hate speech\u2014such as threats of violence, and ethnic, homophobic, or misogynistic slurs.<\/p>\n

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5 key takeaways<\/h4>\n

Lacina\u2019s study was published as an analysis for the Monkey Cage<\/a>, a Washington Post\u00a0<\/em>blog written by political experts.<\/strong><\/p>\n