Homophobia Wars on Twitter

// September 4th, 2009 // All things LGBT

Sometime today it was hard to avoid the #uknowhowiknowurgay trend on twitter. It’s full of filthy, vile and stereotypical comments about LGBT folks and often nothing in particular.

@thelinster started a counter-trend with #yaygay which became a trending topic at the expense of #unknowhowiknowurgay. You can call this a mini (meaningless) social media war although some are dubbing it as the power of community.

Trending statistics

After 3 hours, #yaygay surpassed AT&T, the lowest trending topic, so it should have replaced #AT&T on the trending list. Instead, it came behind AT&T and the homophobic trending topic was removed / replaced.

Maybe I am reading trendistics wrong but #uknowhowiknowurgay was still trending much higher than #yaygay before the removal. It was only after 30 minutes of its removal that it plummeted. Did Twitter step in or are the ‘real-time’ trendistics slow in updating?

Either way, #yaygay lasted at the top for only a short while, before plummeting. 5 hours later #uknowhowiknowurgay was trending again. I checked trendistics and it revealed this chart which certainly does not match up with Twitter trends:
yaygay

There are plenty of losers in all of this but in this 4 hour war, one winner was certainly our cellular phone companies. The other winner is Twitter–way to keep both sides happy.

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One Response to “Homophobia Wars on Twitter”

  1. The Labor Day weekend Twitter war over homophobia. Hint: The lesbians won. says:
    September 7, 2009 at 4:08 pm

    [...] As Margaret Cho once said, “As if you could win a war without lesbians.” We all began to celebrate! Champagne corks flew through the air and…well, okay, that probably didn’t happen but I know I opened a beer and composed a few hundred haiku in its honor. The moon shone brighter, the air smelled sweeter and everyone felt the inexplicable urge to dot their “i”’s with hearts. Our collective joy was short lived, however. By 9 p.m. #yaygay had disappeared from the trending topics and not because our enthusiasm and dedication had waned. The prevailing belief is that #yaygay was yanked. It’s possible that there was never a victory in the first place. [...]

    Reply

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