And The Most Popular Racial Slur on Twitter Is…

A big let down.

It’s “white boy.” The most popular racial slur used on the world’s second most popular social networking site (or third, whatever) is “white boy.”

That’s lame.

A study by the British research group Demos found that despite what those roundups of horrible people saying shitty things online may indicate, we aren’t as bad as we think.

 [The study found] that about 1 in every 15,000 tweets contains a slur. That’s over 10,000 tweets each day.

But, that’s not a lot, when you realize 150 million tweets are sent each and every day. That’s o.oooo7 percent of tweets. And the study stresses that that number lacks context.

Most uses of slurs are done casually, without any violent or abusive intent; only a relatively small number (between 500—2,000 daily) were directed at an individual with derogatory intent.

So hey, good news, everybody: we aren’t as horrible as we think. Or we just finally learned to hide it on the internet, which is a shame, because tweet-shaming is GREAT for pageviews.

[Via The Daily Dot]