Researchers at North Dakota State U. Tell Harriet Hageman They’re Monitoring Her Twitter Account for ‘Toxic’ Language
“We are writing to let you know we are conducting research on the use of toxic language on Twitter by candidates, specifically how use of such language affects election outcomes.”
Harriet Hageman is the Republican who defeated Liz Cheney in the Wyoming GOP primary this summer. The fact that she is being targeted in this way is outrageous.
The College Fix reports:
North Dakota State researchers ‘monitoring’ Republican candidate for ‘toxic’ language
Wyoming Republican congressional candidate Harriet Hageman received a letter from researchers at North Dakota State University telling her they are “monitoring” her Twitter account and will collect her tweets using “toxic language,” Fox News reported Friday.
“I’ll tell you what’s ‘toxic’ — trying to freeze free speech with ominous warnings that ‘we’re watching you’ from pointy-headed college professors and the leftist corporate media,” Hageman stated, according to Fox.
Hageman (pictured) defeated Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney in the Republican primary earlier this year and is expected to win the race for the U.S. House seat in November.
A copy of the email is posted in the article. Twitter shows no posts about the incident from Hageman’s account.
“Dear Harriet Hageman, We are two independent researchers at North Dakota State University,” according to the email. “We are not affiliated with any partisan group in any way. We are writing to let you know we are conducting research on the use of toxic language on Twitter by candidates, specifically how use of such language affects election outcomes.”
“Just before the election, we will write a post on the Monkey Cage blog of The Washington Post that discusses our findings regarding patterns in the use of toxic language,” the email authors stated.
Monkey Cage is a a political analysis blog published by The Washington Post.
The email was signed by Daniel Pernstein, a political science professor and the co-director of the Study of Digital Society at the university, and Yunus Orhan, a post-doctoral fellow at the Digital Society Project, according to their academic websites.
The researchers have yet to formally submit research to the Washington Post.
“A group of scholars from North Dakota State University pitched the Monkey Cage on an article on toxic language based on their research. The Monkey Cage editors indicated provisional interest, but have yet to see or evaluate a formal submission from them,” Monkey Cage editor Henry Farrell told Fox News. “The pitch was unsolicited, and the authors are not affiliated with the Monkey Cage or The Washington Post,” Farrell said to Fox.
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Comments
Well, I guess if Elon Musk refuses to do, someone will have to.
/s/
define toxic language please.
Anything the “researchers” don’t like.
Prepare for some pretty Mean Tweets, bitchez. And thank yourselves.
So ‘independent researchers’ intend to publish their ‘research’ on a Democrat media site just prior to the election. Is that what passes for independent these day? Seems more like election manipulation than genuine research given they won’t have had time to see what the election outcome was let alone determine if there’s any correlation between tweets and outcomes.
As regards “… use of toxic language on Twitter by candidates, specifically how use of such language affects election outcomes” what other candidates are these so called researchers studying?
As for relying on Google’s Perspective API to score tweet toxicity according to “… the average judgement of the regular people who coded a large corpus of text …” would that be actual regular people, or regular Twitter users meaning Far Leftists who defend Far Left toxicity and deem anything non-Left as toxic?
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Nothing instills fear in someone’s soul like being put on notice by two academics at NDSU.
I’m sure she’s scared to death /s/
Isn’t this unlawful election interference, at least as Democrats define it?