If for some inexplicable reason you like what you read, please consider throwing money at one of the awesome organizations fighting anti-trans hate, like Trans Safety Network or Health Liberation Now!.
Hate in a post-information age
A week ago, I posted a dataset that had been compiling over the course of a year based on a series of RSS feeds I’d set up and mostly forgotten about. After merging the data and sifting through them, I find myself left with far more questions somehow than I had come in with. But most of all, what I can’t get out of my mind is the sheer volume of articles.
At first, I thought it was an artifact of the data collection process. Setting the alerts to any news article using the “as-it-happens” frequency setting means that the second Google indexes a news story, it gets pushed to the feed, and that is understandably a lot given the sheer size of the internet.
Anatomy of a moral panic
A year ago, after noticing an alarming shift in both the number and tone of news articles being served search engines like Google and Bing, I cobbled together a system that would log news stories as they were added to Google News in real time. The project garnered a decent amount of attention, and led to a representative from Google reaching out to check my claims that Google was serving extremist content.
Last night, I reran the code and aggregated a full year’s worth of data which is available for free to researchers here.
Three more school bathroom bills pass, and how we got here
While more than 1 in 5 U.S. states having passed laws or enacted policies banning live-saving medical care for trans youth, nearly 1 in 12 states have passed laws banning trans students from bathrooms in accordance with their gender. By the end of this legislative session, that proportion has the potential to reach 1 in 4.