Hope vs. Hate: Understanding User Interactions with LGBTQ+ News Content in Mainstream US News Media through the Lens of Hope Speech

From crowdsourced storymapping projects sharing stories of love, loss, and a sense of belonging [1] to safe, anonymous spaces to seek resources [2] and dating platforms [3] - the internet and modern technologies play a positive role in health and well-being of the LGBTQ+ community in various ways. However, cyberbullying [4], exposure to dehumanization through news media [5], and more recently, worrisome homophobic biases in large language models [6] - are some of the modern technology perils the community grapples with. How do mainstream US cable news outlets cover the LGBTQ+ community and how do users interact with such news content? Via a substantial corpus of more than 130 million YouTube comments on more than 300K YouTube news videos uploaded on three major US cable news outlets, this paper investigates how LGBTQ+ discussions are situated in mainstream US political discourse. While prior literature has analyzed LGBTQ+ discourse in print media through the lens of a dehumanization framework [5], such analyses consulted a single source of news (The New York Times) and did not consider reader responses to LGBTQ+ news. In this work, we consider three major US cable news networks representing diverse political views (Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC) with a key goal to understand how users interact and engage with LGBTQ+ news content. In doing so, we not only focus on identifying negative discussions about the LGBTQ+ community, one of our key contributions is operationalizing the detection of positive, hope speech championing the disadvantaged minority in the broader spirit of counter-speech literature [7, 8, 9, 10, 11].