Racist comments

I just received a Google alert of a new paper that cites our earlier work. The authors describe a Twitter analysis””23andMe confirms: I’m super white“. It showcases a lot of noise …

The two most popular DTC companies, 23andMe and AncestryDNA, also generate the most tweets. However, al-though 23andMe has half the customers, it produces almost 5 times more tweets, which is also due to controversy around their failure to get FDA approval in 2015.

and even more noise

In particular, the “ethnic” breakdown provided by ancestry reports seems to spur several instances of negative sentiment tweets associated with racism and disapproval of multi-cultural/multi-ethnic values. For instance, a user with more than 3K followers self-describing as a “Yuge fan for Donald Trump”, tweets: “Get this race mixing shit off my time line!!” in response to a 23andMe video about ancestry […] Also, Twitter might be removing tweets with hate words as claimed in their hateful conduct policy. Nonetheless, we do find instances of hate speech, e.g., antisemitic tweets […]

This what I already feared, the largely useless genetic testing is being misused for inferior interests. It is dangerous too, just read the recent case history.