By following #lgbtrights, I hope to learn about new places becoming more accepting of people. I also hope to keep up with political decisions regarding equality. In addition, I will learn about the lgbt community as a whole as they express their emotions and pain as they fight for their rights. I find this topic interesting because I have family members and close friends who are a part of the lgbt community and I want them to be happy, so following this hashtag will allow me to keep up with the community and news within the community.<\/p>\n
After moments of using the TAGS system, this hashtag immediately had 300 tweets, and I ended up with 309 tweets total. This hashtag is very common and also a very supportive hashtag of other twitter users. I found that there was a lot of communication between twitter handles saying things like,\u00a0@JustGiving: It’s #LGBTHM17! Big love to all of the amazing people & organizations doing fantastic things for #LGBTrights all over the world.” Immediately I can see a strong community that supports one another. Most of the tweets using this hashtag also use tags such as #LoveisLove #InclusionMatters #Democrat. A lot of people retweeted @venanalysis: #Venezuela legally recognizes first child with two mothers #LGBTrights #InclusionesRevolucion #inclusionmatters https:\/\/t.\u2026I” News in the lgbt community is spread all over twitter, with both the news of Venezuela recognizing legally a child with two mothers and Sapporo, Japan recognizing same-sex couples.<\/p>\n
In my hashtag I expected to see a lot of personal stories about individual’s issues with either coming out or harassment that they felt as individuals. I expected a lot of communication between people in the LGBT community, and also predicted fights and hate tweets towards President Trump. It ended up being a very loving hashtag, where there were hardly any negative or hateful tweets, mostly just preaching for love and equality. I did not expect to see the amount of news stories being covered from all around the world. Although the majority of my tweets were from people in the United States, there was a large amount of tweets from Japan and Venezuela, as big news in the LGBT community was reveled in those places. One tweet in particular really struck me and it was from a person from Texas, it read, “I’m a #proudAmerican, I’m also gay and it hurts to know that no matter how much I love my country, my country doesn’t love me #LGBTrights” This was a tweet that showed how unwelcome people in America can be, and I hope to see change.<\/p>\n
When I researched #LGBTrights in Google news, only one article came up within the past week. I expanded my search to within the past month, and still there was only one article involving my hashtag. This is a telling fact, as when I searched my topic without the hashtag there were plenty of articles about LGBT rights. The article about #LGBTrights was from the Phoenix New Times, regarding how the restaurant 5th<\/sup> and Wine were discriminating against waiter\u2019s sexualities. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission adopted a policy saying that sexual orientation discrimination is also sex discrimination. As a result, this poor treatment of the waiters spread all over twitter. The news that I found while researching my hashtag seemed to involve a specific instance that went viral over the internet, whereas the articles I found about my hashtag topic involved larger news stories about the Politics that would effect the LGBT community as a whole. The two articles I found while researching my hashtag topic both stressed the importance of President Trump\u2019s selection of both his cabinet and his Supreme Court choice. One article talked about the fate of the LGBT community if Trump picks a conservative Supreme Court member, potentially rolling back the clocks of LBGT progress. The other article was about Betsy DeVos, Trump\u2019s pick for Secretary of Education, and her involvement and support of a same-sex couple. DeVos has also aided a transgender woman in making sure she had a bathroom to use. It talked about how her support for the couple goes against her political view, and how she does a bad job of separating her personal life and her work life. This article ended on an optimistic note, with the hopes that her conservative stance might dissolve, but we will just have to wait and see.<\/p>\n When I searched for my hashtag and hashtag topic in the year 2006, there was not a single article involving the topic. This was not that surprising, as\u00a0there were not large strides in the LGBT community until very recently. Same sex marriage was not even legal until 2015, so the issues with LGBT were not that present in the news headlines at the time.<\/p>\n I can totally see that scraping data is a “socio-technical device,” as the data I am collecting both reflects live, raw data and the liveliness of the issue. This issue is very prominent in both the news and on twitter, as 300 tweets can be collected almost instantly upon clicking “Run Now.” I have found that the tweets I have scraped reflect individual raw feelings and emotions about the subject, but also ties to the current events and political side and the reality of the issue. Just like in the reading, “scraping: Issues in Live Social Research,” I found that the words within the tweets often contained the other tag lines that I was seeing in the news. When I searched google, I found that the personal stories appeared less, and the amount of political issues and things more “newsworthy” appeared in the headlines.<\/p>\n Jeremy Peters, \u201cBetsy DeVos, a Friend of LGBT Rights? Past Colleauges Say Yes\u201d The New York Times, <\/em>January 28, 2017, https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/01\/28\/us\/politics\/betsy-devos-gay-transgender-rights.html?_r=1<\/a>.<\/p>\n Marres, Noortje, and Esther Weltevrede. 2013. \u201cScraping the Social?\u201d Journal of Cultural Economy 6 (3): 313\u201335.<\/p>\n Reuters, \u201cLGBT Rights Advocates Question White House Equality Pledge\u201d Newsweek, <\/em>January 31, 2017, http:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/donald-trump-lgbt-lgbt-rights-equality-550959<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ray Stern, \u201cWill Arizona Gay Rights Lawsuit by EEOC Be One of the Last Under Trump Administration?\u201d Pheonix New Times, <\/em>January 27, 2017, http:\/\/www.phoenixnewtimes.com\/news\/will-arizona-gay-rights-lawsuit-by-eeoc-be-one-of-last-under-trump-administration-9022759<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n