Digital Rage: Testing “the Obama Effect” on Internet-Based Expressions of Racism

Abstract

The concept, “White Rage,” has previously been used to describe the way Whites have historically responded to Black advancement with policies and practices designed to quietly disrupt the progress Blacks had been making. White rage is typically subtle, masking its true intent. In contrast, recent research has found that the covert, subtle expressions of racism that are so normal in most mainstream spaces may be less common in internet-based communication. The extent to which online racism is connected to real-world racist attitudes, behaviors, and events, however, is unclear. In this article, we test the effects of real-world racialized events on explicit expressions of racism in online spaces using days that Obama gave speeches as our treatment effect and explicit usage of the “n-word” on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) as our measurable outcome. Does usage of the n-word, a racial slur, increase in the days following speeches made by President Obama? Our results of over 9 years and more than 2.9 million tweets demonstrate a statistically significant increase of racist speech in response to those speech cycles, which are further placed in contrast to the speeches of other political actors, including President Trump.