Tuesday, July 21, 2015

A ranking of German tweets that attack people as a***hole

Note: Yes, we could have obtained a couple of "big data" tools and done a full study.
No, there was no incentive for doing that.
Caution: We limited the search to a single term of abuse. If you do a more comprehensive investigation, your results may vary. We only looked at Twitter, ignoring potentially more vociferous (more than 140 characters) attacks on Facebook.

We did a post titled Germany: freedom of speech, digital Middle Ages a few days ago and mentioned we had looked at hundreds of tweets talking about German comedian Mr. Nuhr, who complained bitterly once again about how he was viciously attacked for a joke about Greece.

We pondered, for a minute, and figured we should do a simple, very limited count of Twitter insults since 1 January for a select number of individuals.

Big data and shrewd language analysis ruled out as too expensive and f***ing time consuming anyway, we decided to limit a) by language: German and b) by insult: Arschloch, German for asshole.

The choice for a) is easily explained. Since folks were complaining about alleged bullying of a sensitive liberal German comedian, we picked German as the tweet language.

The choice of b) was more difficult. We needed an insult that was serious to the point of the target of the insult being able to go after the tweeter in the German court system. We also wanted a term that has a neutral gender (das) to save us the effort of performing separate searches for male and female tweetees (target of a tweet). We also wanted the insult to be a noun without a derived adjective or adverb - in other words - we wanted it to be ad hominem. Lastly, we wanted a common term that was not overly frequent, again due to sheer laziness.

Applying these criteria, the most common Germanic insult "Idiot" was immediately tossed: not only does the same word exist in languages other than German, it also comes with the adjective "idiotisch".

We settled on Arschloch as a suitable term.

Next, we needed to pick individuals and decided on several well known figures as well as on lesser known but nationally sort of significant people. An additional category of public figures who claimed to have been bullied on Twitter as well as some of their most vocal defenders was then compiled for comparison. It turned out that German Chancellor Merkel was not well suited for the time frame of the "study" because almost all tweets that combined her name and Arschloch dealt with a recent production by another German comedian entitled "Merkel - the pragmatic asshole".  So, the chancellor gets a free pass.

Search was performed using the individual's Name + TheOffensive term.

Remember, the numbers below are tweets between 1 Jan and 21 July 2015, and we tried to ensure we only picked those which we believed were clearly "ad hominem" (personal attack). 

Internationally known leaders
Putin: 23
Tspiras, Greek prime minister: 17
Gauck, German president: 16
Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister: 10
Obama:  5
Netanyahu: 2

German politicians 
Edathy, former social democrat rising star, embroiled in child porn scandal: 38
Gabriel, German vice chancellor, social democrat: 17
Seehofer, governor of Bavaria, very conservative: 17
Söder, Bavarian finance minister, very conservative: 11
Kauder, CDU party secretary: 6
Gysi, Left party chairman: 3
Ströbele, Green party: 1

Actors/comedians claiming rampant bullying
Dieter Nuhr: 5
Till Schweiger: 2

Conservative journalists supporting Nuhr/Schweiger claims of rampant bullying
Julian Reichelt, tabloid Bild Zeitung: 1
Jasper von Altenbockum, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: 1

The initial reaction to these counts was how come there are so few among millions of tweets in the timeframe in question?
All out a***hole attacks are simply not that common, period. As a matter of fact, an overview of use of the term in the past two weeks shows that an easy 98% of occurrences are for porn, "self-incrimination" (I behaved like...) or much more generic (no personal attack).

The ranking of the internationally known leaders is hardly a surprise, Mr. Putin tops, next come the "greedy Greeks". No anti-American sentiment, and no rampant anti-Semitism either. Among the German politicians, the top ranked Mr. Edathy is self explanatory, given the highly emotional nature of the issue.

We would not call the actor/comedian results proof of rampant bullying since both of them did make strong. polarizing statements prior to these responses. For Mr. Schweiger, the last previous A****hole incident dates back to 2013.

The two journalists who led the recent outcry about vicious mob rule, it appears they must have more insight into the phenomenon than our Twitter figures let on.

Or, maybe, it is harder to pass up on a good social media bashing than we in the K-Landnews basement newsroom can imagine.

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