Homophobic Trends and Twitter Wars

Today around 1.00 AM IST, while almost everyone on this side of the Atlantic was asleep, a new twitter trend reared its head. True to my vampire nature, I was up with my friends across the pond (and a couple of European nightowls as well) when we noticed this trending topic and went ballistic: #uknowhowiknowuregay

Tackyness and poor grammar aside, it really was as bad as it sounds. Tweets promoting this trend ranged from silly to truly homophobic. Most such tweets were rife with gay bashing and offensive stereotyping, outrageous regardless of whether the hashtag had initially been intended as a light-hearted joke or not. Some idiot thought it would make a good trending topic and that's how it began.

@thelinster coined a counter-trend to revolt against the ongoing gay bashing: #yaygay. Starting with tweetsbians, it wasn't long before the #yaygay hashtag gained popularity. Retweet upon retweet, people were urged to attach #yaygay to their pro-LGBT tweets. Some were aiming solely to overthrow the trend while some were also trying to educate the perpetuators of #uknowhowiknowuregay by hijacking the offensive hashtags in the process.

Sometime mid-war, a similar hashtag slipped into the trending topics: #uknowhowiknowurgay, without the 'e' in 'ure'.

This was the first Twitter war I participated in. I don't care much about trends but this one hit too close to home not to follow. I was among the handful who ignited the #yaygay rebellion and were involved in it from the start. More and more people kept joining in. 6 hours and gazillions of tweets later the mission was accomplished around 7.00 AM IST and #yaygay became the no. 1 trending topic. In the meanwhile, Twitter had apparently removed #uknowhowiknowuregay and #uknowhowiknowurgay from its homepage due to the controversy it had caused. Exhausted, I fell asleep at half past seven in the morning.

Check out the first few pages of my twitter stream for a glimpse of what went through. For a more statistical, er, trendistical approach go over to Prerna Lal's blog.

A bit silly, I know. But it does attach importance to the power of community in social media. It is amazing how there were less than 10 of us in the beginning but the numbers grew steeply and #yaygay soon became the top trending topic, if only for a while.

Sadly, Twitter also removed the #yaygay trend from its homepage for undisclosed reasons. #twitterfail, anyone?
It's angering that this trend was censored soon after it became the top trend. It was a revolt of sorts against the gay bashing that the Queer community has always been subject to. I'm trying not to go into the whole biased censorship thing here but I do know for a fact that the homophobic trends were up for hours until we decided to do something about it. You can read more on that here.

Because our lives are way too short to waste on hate, let's embrace love and equality for all. #yaygay [link]

A big thank you and a bear hug to each one of the rebels. Good job, soldiers! Yay gay!