Homophobia Wars on Twitter

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:

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.