Buffalo Most Anti-gay City In America? Study pins Buffalo as source of high number of anti-gay, racist tweets

Buffalo tagged most anti-gay city in America, based on rampant homophobic tweets.

Even with Twitter promising to crack down on hate speech, the 140-character social-media platform is a hotbed of language that’s abusive toward minorities and women.

The apartment-hunting site Abodo.com did a deep dive into Twitter—examining more than 12 million tweets sent between June 2014 and December 2015 for slurs against LGBT people, women, African-Americans, Latinos, the disabled and other groups.

Buffalo Most Anti-gay City In America? Study pins Buffalo as source of high number of anti-gay, racist tweets

Surprisingly, the number one city for anti-gay tweets wasn’t in the South: Buffalo, New York, registered 168 homophobic tweets per 100,000 messages.

“Compared with the usage of slurs in other categories, anti-gay language remains commonplace,” the report states.

“Many of these states—Texas, Nebraska, and Louisiana—show a level of support for legal gay marriage that’s lower than the national average. However, even traditionally liberal urban areas such as Los Angeles and San Francisco show levels as high as 86.2 and 49.6 per 100,000 tweets, respectively.”

Researchers admit it’s uncertain how many of the tweets are sent with harmful intent, and how many reflect “in-group reclamation” of terms like “fag,” “dyke” or “homo.”

Las Vegas, Nevada, had the most transphobic tweets—99 out of every 100,000.

Buffalo Most Anti-gay City In America? Study pins Buffalo as source of high number of anti-gay, racist tweets

According the report:

While major events such as the coming out of Caitlyn Jenner in 2015 drew attention to the experiences of transgender people in society, much of the public remains unfamiliar with the proper language preferred by trans people.

Widespread usage of terms such as “tranny” and “she-male” is still somewhat common, even though these words are generally considered slurs by the community.

Abodo’s report suggests that questionable language about trans people may be coming from Sin City because it is “a national hub of the adult film industry”: “Tweets originating from there could more often be using these traditionally negative terms in a promotional and marketing context.”

In the larger scheme of things, Louisiana had the highest rate of derogatory tweets of any state, with 1,155 biased comments per 100,000. Nevada, Texas, Maryland and Delaware round out the top five.

Agencies/Canadajournal