Phrases like “that’s so gay” are part of many people’s daily conversation, but that kind of casual homophobia creates discrimination, especially among young people.
A new online project called No Homophobes.com monitors how often people use homophobic phrases on Twitter. They found that the phrase “faggot” was used more that 26 million times on Twitter between July 2012 and May 2014. Researcher Kristopher Wells is behind that project and says that hate crimes are most likely to occur against black people, Jewish people, and sexual minorities.
He says we’re in the middle of a huge cultural change, where it used to be OK and permissible to discriminate, and now we need to educate people and break down stereotypes.
