Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany; Institute of Physics, Potsdam University, Potsdam, Germany.
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany; Institute of Physics, Potsdam University, Potsdam, Germany; Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
Lancet Planet Health. 2022 Sep;6(9):e714-e725. doi: 10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00173-5.
A link between weather and aggression in the offline world has been established across a variety of societal settings. Simultaneously, the rapid digitalisation of nearly every aspect of everyday life has led to a high frequency of interpersonal conflicts online. Hate speech online has become a prevalent problem that has been shown to aggravate mental health conditions, especially among young people and marginalised groups. We examine the effect of temperature on the occurrence of hate speech on the social media platform Twitter and interpret the results in the context of the interlinkage between climate change, human behaviour, and mental health.
In this quantitative empirical study, we used a supervised machine learning approach to identify hate speech in a dataset containing around 4 billion geolocated tweets from 773 cities across the USA between May 1, 2014 and May 1, 2020. We statistically evaluated the changes in daily hate tweets against changes in local temperature, isolating the temperature influence from confounding factors using binned panel-regression models.
The prevalence of hate tweets was lowest at moderate temperatures (12 to 21°C) and marked increases in the number of hate tweets were observed at hotter and colder temperatures, reaching up to 12·5% (95% CI 8·0-16·5) for cold temperature extremes (-6 to -3°C) and up to 22·0% (95% CI 20·5-23·5) for hot temperature extremes (42 to 45°C). Outside of the moderate temperature range, the hate tweets also increased as a proportion of total tweeting activity. The quasi-quadratic shape of the temperature-hate tweet curve was robust across varying climate zones, income quartiles, religious and political beliefs, and both city-level and state-level aggregations. However, temperature ranges with the lowest prevalence of hate tweets were centred around the local temperature mean and the magnitude of the increases in hate tweets for hot and cold temperatures varied across the climate zones.
Our results highlight hate speech online as a potential channel through which temperature alters interpersonal conflict and societal aggression. We provide empirical evidence that hot and cold temperatures can aggravate aggressive tendencies online. The prevalence of the results across climatic and socioeconomic subgroups points to limitations in the ability of humans to adapt to temperature extremes.
Volkswagen Foundation.
在各种社会环境中，已经证实了线下世界中天气与攻击性之间存在关联。与此同时，日常生活的几乎各个方面都在迅速数字化，导致在线人际冲突的频率很高。网络仇恨言论已成为一个普遍存在的问题，它被证明会加剧心理健康状况，尤其是在年轻人和弱势群体中。我们研究了温度对社交媒体平台 Twitter 上仇恨言论发生的影响，并在气候变化、人类行为和心理健康之间相互关联的背景下解释结果。
在这项定量实证研究中，我们使用了监督机器学习方法来识别包含 2014 年 5 月 1 日至 2020 年 5 月 1 日来自美国 773 个城市的大约 40 亿条地理位置标记推文的数据集内的仇恨言论。我们使用分组面板回归模型从混杂因素中分离出温度影响，统计评估了当地温度变化与每日仇恨推文之间的变化。
在中等温度（12 至 21°C）下，仇恨推文的出现率最低，而在较热和较冷的温度下，仇恨推文的数量明显增加，在极冷温度（-6 至-3°C）下达到最高 12.5%（95%CI8.0-16.5），在极热温度（42 至 45°C）下达到最高 22.0%（95%CI20.5-23.5）。在中等温度范围之外，仇恨推文也随着总推文活动的比例增加而增加。温度与仇恨推文曲线的准二次形状在不同气候带、收入四分位数、宗教和政治信仰以及城市和州级聚合中都是稳健的。然而，仇恨推文出现率最低的温度范围以当地温度平均值为中心，而在炎热和寒冷温度下仇恨推文增加的幅度因气候带而异。
我们的结果强调了网络仇恨言论作为一种潜在渠道，通过这种渠道，温度会改变人际冲突和社会攻击性。我们提供了实证证据，表明炎热和寒冷的温度会加剧在线攻击性倾向。这些结果在气候和社会经济亚组中具有普遍性，表明人类适应温度极端变化的能力有限。
大众汽车基金会。
