Queer Digital Community: An Analysis of Twitter Counterpublics

With the growing need for a sociological understanding of behavior on social media platforms, there is a desire to know how marginalized groups engage with these technologies. This study asks whether queer people on Twitter utilize the platform to create a counterpublic - a group of strangers linked by a shared oppositional discourse to the dominant public discourse. To answer this, I compare the interaction patterns and thematic content of queer tweets with a previously identified Twitter counterpublic, Black Twitter, and dominant public, liberal and conservative Twitter. To locate queer Twitter content, I developed a process that intakes a starting term speculating where a community may be and finds hashtags used most by accounts that recently tweeted with the starting term. Using the starting term "#lgbtq," I discovered that #gay and #lgbt were the most used during the observation period. I also conducted this process to find the most used hashtags for the liberal Twitter community (#voteblue and #redwave), the conservative Twitter community (#trump and #maga), and the Black Twitter community (#blackpanther and #kyrie). By analyzing levels of engagement using a negative binomial regression, I find that queer tweets are significantly more likely to receive replies than those from the other communities. Using hierarchical cluster analysis and structured topic modeling, I conduct a content analysis that reveals that a large portion (70%) of queer tweets relate to pornographic content. Through posting intimate content, these tweets express oppositional sexualities excluded in dominant publics. I claim that queer people create a counterpublic on Twitter because tweets using queer hashtags show a higher level of commentary-based communication than the other Twitter communities and develop unique thematic content distinct and oppositional to the dominant public. Future research should build upon these findings to discover other avenues of queer online community outside of this narrow band of online communication.