According to a new study by think tank Demos, 10,000 tweets containing a racial slur of some sort are posted on Twitter every day. To arrive at that figure, the group’s social media unit analyzed a whopping 126,975 English-language tweets from around the globe over a 9-day period last November.
It’s not all bad news though. As many as 70 percent of tweets containing racial epithets use them in a “non-derogatory fashion — often to describe themselves or their own community” in a way that might express group solidarity or “re-claim” slurs. Only one percent used them as part of a political statement or call to action.
The U.K.-based study comes only a few months after Twitter rolled out the “report abuse” button in August. Researchers who conducted the study found that as few as 500 tweets a day directed abuse towards another person.