Buffalo Is The Most Anti-Gay City In America? Considering Number Of Homophobic Tweets, The City Of Good Neighbors Isn’t So Good To Gays

Buffalo might be the most anti-gay city in the United States. According to the sheer volume of homophobic tweets originating from the region, the city might be one of the most hostile regions for people with same-gender preference.

According to an unofficial study that examined the origin of homophobic social media messages, Buffalo is the number one city that has the most hatred towards gays. It seems while the city might may be famously known as the “The City of Good Neighbors,” when it comes to gays, the city’s kindness dries up and loathing takes it place. Interestingly, the tweets suggest Buffalo isn’t so demeaning to blacks as compared to other cities like Baltimore. Moreover, the city doesn’t even feature in the top 10 cities that hate Hispanics or the transgender, but when it comes to gays, the city is quite outspoken on Twitter.

Apartment-hunting site Abodo.com, undertook a massive data analysis project. The platform dove deep into Twitter and its steady stream of 140-charactered messages originating from different regions of America. The primary intention behind the project was to identify the locations that spewed out the most slurs against LGBT people, women, African-Americans, Latinos, the disabled, and other groups.

After analyzing more than 12 million tweets sent between June, 2014, and December, 2015, for hate content, the results that emerged were quite surprising. According to the company, among the marginalized and targeted groups, the most hatred emanating through the tweets was directed towards the gays.

The company realized the majority of the anti-gay tweets weren’t originating from the South. About 168 homophobic tweets per 100,000 messages originated from Buffalo, New York, noted the report.

“Compared with the usage of slurs in other categories, anti-gay language remains commonplace. 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 there needs to be a lot more research conducted to truly understand why Buffalo may have topped the list of cities churning out anti-gay tweets. Moreover, they are uncertain how many of the tweets are sent with harmful intent, and how many reflect “in-group reclamation,” reported New Now Next.

Twitter is widely acknowledged as more accurate than other metrics as nearly all of its data is available to the public, reported Buffalo. However, there are reliable reports that contradict the claims about Twitter data.

The report indicates that Wyoming is the safest city for gays. Incidentally, the city’s Twitter users have been found to use the least derogatory language, followed by Montana. Some experts argue the data may be influenced by the population. Lower populations seem to equate with less intolerance, reported The Daily Beast. On the other hand, cities like Wyoming may not have many active Twitter users that send out as many tweets as users in Louisiana.

The number of active Twitter users may not be balanced, who could show Buffalo in bad light, point out those questioning the veracity of the report. Furthermore, Twitter relies on geo-location, which continues to remain an optional feature that many users prefer to keep switched off. The report may not be trusted because it relies on a single social media platform to draw conclusions. Could it be that non-Twitter users in Buffalo are a lot more tolerant to gays than those who prefer the micro-blogging network?

For a detailed insight into the original Abodo report, titled “Tolerance In America,” a PDF does exist, which dwells upon the methodology and includes a laundry list of derogatory terms searched for through Twitter.

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