There's Something Rather Despicable In The News Today.

Apparently Canadians were 600% shinier, happier people online last year. Damn.

All that repressed aggression was gonna come spilling out sooner or later.

Cision scanned social media, blogs and comments threads between November 2015 and November 2016 for slurs and intolerant phrases like "ban Muslims," "sieg heil" or "white genocide." They found that terms related to white supremacy jumped 300 per cent, while terms related to Islamophobia increased 200 per cent.

Shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how these words might have become more prevalent in the last year without an increase in online hate speech. The first one would've been prevalent in mainstream news articles.

In reply to gearheadmb:

Sad, but true. For the longest time I thought it was just me.

GameboyRMH wrote:

Cision scanned social media, blogs and comments threads between November 2015 and November 2016 for slurs and intolerant phrases like "ban Muslims," "sieg heil" or "white genocide." They found that terms related to white supremacy jumped 300 per cent, while terms related to Islamophobia increased 200 per cent.

Shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how these words might have become more prevalent in the last year without an increase in online hate speech. The first one would've been prevalent in mainstream news articles.

That would make sense, although the study did exclude media articles.

if they are up 600%, does that put them up to about a quarter as bad as us 'muricans?

I assume this will end in a giant collective "sorry", because canada

I bet it's the fault of those damn Quebecois

And thus we get to the problem of using % as an increase...

If you have two occurrences a year of something, and it happens 10 times this year, it's a 500% increase. Now, if you have a whole lot of something, and those two occurrences are, say, two in a million or so, (.000002 % of one million), and it's now 10 instead, you're up to .00001 % of one million. Sure, it's an increase, but it's an inconsequential one.

That explains the rise in Canadian road rage:

WonkoTheSane wrote: And thus we get to the problem of using % as an increase... If you have two occurrences a year of something, and it happens 10 times this year, it's a 500% increase. Now, if you have a whole lot of something, and those two occurrences are, say, two in a million or so, (.000002 % of one million), and it's now 10 instead, you're up to .00001 % of one million. Sure, it's an increase, but it's an inconsequential one.

It’s like those stupid commercials by the former can you hear me now guy…”our dropped call rate is only 1% more than that of our expensive competitor”. Let me guess, their dropped call rate is 0.1% and yours is 1.1% so I’m going to get berked eleven times more often if I sign up with you.

At least those commercial slots afford me an opportunity to educate my daughters about junk math.