Is there a lot of homophobia on social media? This was certainly the question that the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services (iSMSS), at the University of Alberta, asked when launching the website NoHomophobes.com, which tracks and counts the use of homophobic slurs in Twitter.
Even knowing that homophobia is still very present on the internet, the results of the microblog, however, are frightening. O NoHomophobes.com was launched on July 5th, and, after around 80 days on air, it has already recorded, for example, more than 2 million mentions of "faggot" (photo), an offensive word in English that we can translate as "deer".
According to statistics, "faggot" is tweeted almost 1 million times a month, or more than 10 million times in a year, the website reported. BuzzFeed. The analysis also takes into account the expressions "so gay" ("so gay"), "no homo" (an expression widely used in hip hop to reject anything that could be associated with homosexuality) and "dyke" (an offensive word against lesbians).
"We never imagined the scale of casual homophobia that actually exists on social media. The use of homophobic language remains one of the few socially acceptable forms of discrimination […], it is still prevalent and can be heard everywhere in our society," commented the associate director of iSMSS, Dr. Kristopher Wells, according to the BuzzFeed.
Anyone who wants to know more about the use of homophobic language in Twitter you can check here. The site also captures the latest posts that contain them. Breath, right?
