Analyzing Racial Bias among Politicians’ Tweets on Mass Shootings

Shohini Stout

How do elected politicians characterize perpetrators of mass shootings differently?

Does this correlate with established racial stereotypes?

Word Embeddings Encode Word Similarity

This similarity can encode stereotypes

Implicit Association Test measures psychological hidden bias

115th Congress Tweets (filtered by keyword)

Democratic Congressmen and Congresswomen

Republican Congressmen and Congresswomen

Word2vec semi-transfer

Word2vec semi-transfer

Word Embedding Association Test

comparative bias scores

pleasant vs unpleasant

thug

terrorist

mentally ill

alone vs group

responsibility

anger

sadness

Demo

Next Steps

115th Congress Tweets (filtered by keyword)

clustering (time, location keywords, hashtags)

Democrats before shooter identity revealed

Democrats after shooter identity revealed

Republicans before shooter identity revealed

Republicans after shooter identity revealed

split by shooter race

split by shooter race

Word2vec semi-transfer

Word2vec semi-transfer

Word2vec semi-transfer

Word2vec semi-transfer

Word Embedding Association Test

Word Embedding Association Test

Word Embedding Association Test

Word Embedding Association Test

bias scores