Planning a trip? You may want to avoid Buffalo, NY, Arlington, TX and Riverside, CA.
These are the nation’s top three antigay cities, according to new analysis of hateful language on Twitter.
Adobo.com — a site that helps perspective tenants find apartments — pored over 12 million tweets written between June 2014 and December 2015. They looked for tweets that contained slurs and other derogatory language against LGBTQ people, as well as several other minority groups.
The slurs searched for included “f*g,” “fa*got,” “homo,” “dyke,” “sodomite,” and “lesbo,” among others.
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Riverside, a suburb about 60 miles east of Los Angeles known for its thriving dinner theater industry, ranked #3 when it came to antigay tweets, with over 15.8 million antigay tweets.
Arlington, a sprawling suburb crammed between Dallas and Fort Worth, came in second, with 16.1 million antigay tweets. Not surprisingly, the city also ranked in the top 10 in three other categories: anti-Black, anti-Hispanic, and sexist.
But it was the snowy city of Buffalo that took home the top prize for being the most homophobic, with an impressive 16.8 million antigay tweets.
“What this tells me is there’s a lot of work to be done,” gay rights activist Margaret Smith told The Buffalo News. “This is about a lot more than marriage. We are our words. Tweeting is a little anonymous, as is online behavior. But right now, there’s lot of people on television giving lots of other people permission to be hateful.”
Check out the top 10 most homophobic cities on Twitter below, and read Adobo’s full report here.
