Lurking

This week I am to be “lurking” on social media on the subject of the LGBT community. I am doing this to explore the environment and community of these sites, which are Facebook- LGBT News and Instagram- LGBTTEXTPOSTS. 

I “lurk,” view site or page without contributing by comment, about as often as I can. That means I will visit these sights at least twice a day and stay on them for as long as I can learn something new or am simply enjoying myself. These sights can be funny. They have memes, funny pictures with captions, that have to do with the LGBT community. Anyway, I feel hesitant almost to be lurking on the Instagram account because if I go too late in the posting and accidentally like something then the user will see it and that’s kind of weird. Those of you out there will know what I’m talking about. The Facebook site, however, I have no problem lurking because there is a specific button I have to push in order to like it. On Instagram it’s a double tap and sometimes if you leave your finger on there too long  the post can be liked.

The Instagram account posts averaging on day to day while the Facebook account averages about every hour. What I found interesting is on both sites I found individuals preaching. All the preaching was found on the commenting. I’m not entirely sure what those people are getting at, but I do feel that they are trying to provoke an individual to “choose” not to be gay and be “normal”. I don’t particularly like this. Also on the Instagram account I found a lot more hate speech being used which was just awful. Literally people would tell others to go “kill yourself”. That still strikes me. People can be so bold when they hide behind a key board. People comment back sometimes aggressively,  sometimes advocating for peace. The Facebook sight has much less of this, to my relief. 

Those who are not trolls and extremely supportive and courteous. Often times they can be funny and ask questions about the post or things like that. On the Instagram account I noticed something that not everyone does. The user of the account has the left column on their account to be full of LGBT couples while the middle and right column are of text. I found this interesting because not only is this rare but it is meticulously done, and well done at that.