A map purporting to display the average IQ in every American state is making the rounds online this week, and it contains both good news and bad news for Alabama.

The good news is that the average Alabamian appears to be more intelligent than their next-door neighbors in Mississippi and the libs out in California. The bad news is, that’s about it.

So is it accurate?

First of all, the IQ map was created by popular real estate blog Movoto after they analyzed 500,000 tweets.

They used the tweets to calculate each state’s average reading level. Since tweets can be no longer than 140 characters and often include slang terms, abbreviations and sentence fragments, this seems like a pretty suspect way to calculate anyone’s actual reading level.

But what they found is actually pretty interesting.

“While the scores overall were relatively low (states fell between a fourth grade and sixth grade reading level), the required brevity of tweets is likely the cause of this and the comparison of states is the real measurement of interest,” Movoto’s Chris Kolmar explained. “It’s important to note that the age of the tweeter was not taken into consideration. However, even without that stipulation, a clear regional pattern emerged and coincides fairly well with state educational performance statistics.”

Of the five states that ranked the lowest in grade-level reading ability in Movoto’s tweet analysis, four of them also ranked among the worst-educated states in 2011: Mississippi (2nd), Arkansas (3rd), Louisiana (5th), and Alabama (6th).

After assessing each state’s reading level, Movoto then used a computer algorithm to score tweets based on spelling, grammar and word choice, which they believe gave them a reliable system to calculate intelligence.

“There’s a difficult to overlook correlation between the estimated average state IQ levels and the respective reading levels of the tweets produced in each state,” said Kolmar. “An interesting question which is not explored here would examine the reason behind this correlation. Are worse writing skills correlated with lower IQ scores, or are IQ tests necessarily biased to the better educated?”

It’s always worth remembering in general that correlation does not equal causation.

So what do you think about Movoto’s IQ map? Do you think it’s accurate, or way off base? Let us know in the comment section below.

And check out the interactive map here: