Racism and social media: A study in Indian context

Abstract

Racism is a kind of hatred behaviour, exhibited in written, verbal or physical form against the ethnicity or physical appearance of a group or an individual. Around the world, problematic behavioural incidents occur and in India, media often interpret it as towards people of colour or blacks. There was a lot of discussion about these incidents both online and offline, some groups consider that India is not free from racism and others view it is of misinformation processing. Therefore, there is a requirement of a system to evaluate and determine the possible scenarios towards racism in India. In this regard, using four different sets of keywords we created Twitter datasets. The data collected from social media are analysed to identify the polarity of content and the amount of racism using the software developed in R programming language. Contents are categorised in different polarities such as racist, non-racist and neutral. Copyright 2019 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.