But the prevalence of discriminatory tweets aimed at particular groups is troubling...which is why students at the University of Denver and Metro State University of Denver can't be pleased that their respective schools turned up on a list of the ten colleges sending the most derogatory messages to and about women.
The data comes from CollegeStats.org, which describes its approach like so: "Out of a data set of 11 million tweets, we selected 1,537 universities with 2.4 million tweets between them for analysis."
Next, the organization searched for hateful terms for Caucasians, African Americans and those of Middle Eastern, Asian, Hispanic, Indian and Native American descent. (To see them all, click here.) Searches were also conducted for the following anti-male, anti-female and anti-gay slurs:
Male: Chauvinist pig, dirty old man, fuckboy, dickWhen it came to misogynistic tweets using all six anti-female terms listed above, no Colorado colleges appeared among the ten worst offenders.
Female: Bitch, cunt, hag, bimbo, slut, twat
Gay: Fag, faggot, homo, dyke, sodomite, lesbo
Here's a graphic highlighting those that did....
...as well as an accompanying chart:
But things changed when references to the word "bitch" were removed — presumably because the ubiquitous term is used in a variety of contexts, not all of them female-specific.
When that approach was taken, both DU and Metro made the cut, although barely.
Here's a graphic of the ten schools that ranked lowest sans "bitch"....
...and its chart:
The site notes that "the remaining universities all fall within less than a tenth of one word."
As such, DU and Metro students are spewing only a small amount more anti-female hate than many other schools around the country — but that's hardly an excuse or a justification.
And indeed, local students quizzed by Fox31 about the results seemed appropriately embarrassed to make such a mark.
Our advice: Please try to limit your insulting tweets to Tom Brady from now on.
Here's the Fox31 report.
