ORGANIZED HATRED AT GUNPOINT FROM THE COMPUTER. A STUDY ON THE DISTRIBUTION PATTERN OF HATE GROUPS IN THE UNITED STATES (2004 – 2013)

Abstract

Racism and hate groups represent a problem that afflicts the United States and several countries around the
world. However, study groups of hatred are not easy, because many are in the boundary between legality and
illegality identifies them, it is not always easy. In this sense, our hypothesis in this work is that Google Trends is a useful
tool for the identification of geographical distribution of hate groups. To test our hypothesis we conducted a study on hate
groups in the United States and the default interest in topics related to racism. We use data from The Southern Poverty Law
Center, about distributing two hate groups by region in the United States (2013) and created with Google
Trends three frequencies (and an average reactive to them) about the interest in the United States of racism-related
topics (2004-2013). Our results show that there is a high positive correlation (p= < 0.001, r= 0.513) between the
average interest in topics related to racism and hatred (measured in Google Trends) and the distribution of hate
groups measured by The Southern Poverty Law Center, which shows that our hypothesis enjoys wide grip. The result shows
that Google Trends can be used accurately in the United States to identify the geographical distribution of hate
groups, nevertheless, indicates that he may also present positive results in other countries.