Temperature impacts on hate speech online: evidence from 4 billion geolocated tweets from the USA

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.

In this study researchers from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research 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.

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