Online homophobia surged as Donald Trump was elected president
By Will Stroude
A huge spike in homophobic tweets was seen on the day of the US election and in the immediate aftermath.
Bucking the encouraging downward trend of general homophobic language on Twitter, the homophobia monitor NoHomophobes.com recorded a staggering increase of homophobic keywords on the 8th and the 9th of November this month, as Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States of America.
The website records every instance of the terms, “faggot”, “no homo”, “so gay” and “dyke”, on Twitter, to highlight how widespread casual homophobia is. The service was created by the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services at the University of Alberta, USA.
While uses of the word “faggot” have hovered at around 45,000 a week since January 2014, on November 8 – the day of the election – over 31,000 uses of the word were recorded in a single day.
There were 10,000 uses of the word the day after (November 9).
The figures echo a reported upsurge in anti-LGBT hate crimes across the country, following Trump’s win, including a gay-friendly church was vandalised with the words “heil Trump” and “fag church”.
Despite Trump’s victory being seen as a threat to a number of LGBT rights, 14% of LGBT people voted for the incoming president. Find out why some of them decided to vote against their own interests here.
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