Buffalo, New York ranks the highest in the nation when it comes to tweets that use derogatory language about gay people, according to a new study.
The rankings in the study were established through an analysis of 12 million tweets from June 2014 to December 2015 by Abodo, a website that helps tenants find apartments, as part of its Best Places to Live series.
Abodo pulled tweets that used one of 154 words it identified – either as neutral or as derogatory – as being associated with people who are black, Latino, female, gay or lesbian, transgender, intellectually disabled, or overweight. The study measured derogatory language in terms of the number of uses of certain words per 100,000 tweets.
Buffalonians on Twitter used anti-gay terms 169 times per 100,000 tweets.
Twitter users in Buffalo also used anti-black words 52 times per 100,000 tweets. That landed the city No. 8 for the prevalence of anti-black words on Twitter. Baltimore was first, with 82 anti-black words per 100,000 tweets, followed by Atlanta and New Orleans.
According to the study, Arlington, TX ranked second, followed by Riverside, CA and Fontana, CA, with Lincoln NE rounding out the top five.
