Reflections on hateful responses to research on hate in the United States

While researching hate and gaining media attention beginning in 2018, we incurred a good amount of hate toward us and our research in the form of online comments and direct correspondence. Rather than just pass the comments off as general hate, we collected the text and analyzed it in an attempt to better understand the beliefs, perceptions, and arguments of those that rejected our efforts toward gaining knowledge on geographical hate trends. We use content analysis to identify categories of anti-hate research argumentation based on the comments. A discussion is provided on the implications of our findings and insight from our experiences is given.