A British research organization trawled nine days of Twitter’s live feed looking to see just how people use racial slurs online.

Their results are counter-intuitive. While more than 14,000 messages a day typically have an identifiable racial slur.

The most common slur used: White boy.

Also common were “paki,” “whitey,” “pikey,” “nigga,” “spic,” “crow,” “squinty” and “wigga.” Roughly half of the instances involve the use of derogatory language “in a non-offensive, non-abusive manner, to express in-group solidarity or non-derogatory description,” Demos wrote. These top ten contained about 87 percent of racial slurs in the sample. “Relatively few tweets – from 500 to 2,000 per day – were directed at an individual and clearly abusive.”

“The racially-prejudiced tweets appear not to be uniform in nature; we suggest that a proportion of such tweets might be described as showing a ‘casual use’ of slurs,” Demos wrote. “They contain phraseology that might be deemed insulting, abusive, or threatening, and they use terms in a prejudicial fashion, but the terms are used in an off-hand or casual manner. … It suggests underlying racism, but conveyance of that racist viewpoint is often not the point of the message.”

Originally posted by kyleaustin

'white boy'

/ends thread

Originally posted by Coolada

What is a "crow"?