As scapegoating online intensifies, offline attacks are also on the rise, writes Alejandra Caraballo.
One year ago today, more than 250 LGBTQ celebrities and allies sent an open letter to Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and X, urging their CEOs to address the epidemic of harmful hate and dangerous misinformation that targets transgender people and continues to grow on their platforms. We called on these companies to develop and publicly release plans and information about how they will address this material in light of their existing hate and harassment policies. Yet by this anniversary, no such plans have been presented, despite our continued requests over the past year.
The letter’s signatories, including media figures ALOK, Angelica Ross, Brandi Carlile, Dan Levy, Dylan Mulvaney, Elliot Page, Indya Moore, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janelle Monáe, Laverne Cox, Lena Waithe, Matt Bernstein, Michaela Jay Rodriguez, Niecy Nash Betts, Raquel Willis, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Wilson Cruz, among others, called on the platforms to develop and share specific plans to address the following issues:
Content that spreads malicious lies and disinformation about medically necessary health care for transgender young people. Accounts and posts that spread anti-LGBTQ extremist hatred and disinformation in violation of platform policies. Dehumanizing and hateful attacks against prominent transgender public figures and influencers. Anti-transgender hate speech, including targeted misgendering, deadnaming, and other hate-driven tropes.
More hate online, more violence offline
The relentless fearmongering, hatred and scapegoating of LGBTQ people and the LGBTQ community is harmful and dangerous, and fuels violence against the community. In the past few weeks alone, several prominent anti-LGBTQ social media accounts have praised and glorified the burning and destruction of pride flags, fueling a nationwide escalation in vandalism and violence against pride imagery in public spaces. Last year, a store owner was murdered after trying to stop someone from defacing a pride flag in his storefront. The perpetrator was found to have had an X (formerly Twitter) account that had pinned a post of a burning pride flag. What happens online doesn’t stop there.
These coordinated campaigns by fraudulent bigots and extremists use networked incitement and probabilistic terrorism, a form of incitement to violence that uses inflammatory rhetoric on social media against specific groups while refraining from explicitly calling for violence with the tacit understanding that violence is likely to occur. Such efforts have been used to great effect to incite bomb threats, death threats, armed protests, arson, and vandalism against the LGBTQ community, its institutions, and allies. Social media companies have consistently failed to develop (or enforce) adequate policies to address this issue, allowing bad actors to use their platforms to incite such behavior even when a clear connection has been demonstrated, such as in the case of bomb threats made against a school by Chaya Raiczyk, known as Libs on TikTok, after she posted in support of LGBTQ students.
The rise in expressions of hatred and violence against the LGBTQ community is not happening in a vacuum. A powerful new report by Over Zero on Decoding LGBTQ Scapegoating notes that “rhetoric, politics, and physical attacks targeting the LGBTQ community are central elements of authoritarian strategies, in addition to serious rights issues, and are dressed up in culture war politics as usual. LGBTQ scapegoating is not random.” The report concludes that these attacks are rooted in a deeper attempt to “erode democracy itself.” When we see foundational institutions like schools and children’s hospitals being assaulted with threats and violence, the very fabric of society is torn apart.
Social media platforms have a responsibility to all their users, and to society at large, to keep their products safe. Time and again, social media companies have been shown to be complicit in inciting genocide and sectarian violence around the world, as disinformation and unchecked hatred fuel violence against minority communities, such as the Rohingya in Myanmar, Muslims in northern India, and the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. These companies have spectacularly failed in this situation, as increasing shareholder value takes priority over the health and safety of society.
“With one voice, we call on you to create and enforce stronger content and advertising policies to confront head-on content that harms transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming people online and offline,” the open letter states. “It is time for social media companies to take social and moral responsibility, enforce their policies, and take immediate and meaningful action to prevent further harm.”
