(Photo by Christopher Kane)
According to a report released Aug. 10 by the Human Rights Campaign and The Center for Countering Digital Hate, Facebook and Twitter are permitting the spread of content linking LGBTQ people to pedophiles or “groomers.”
The authors of “Digital Hate: Social Media’s Role in Amplifying Dangerous Lies about LGBTQ+ People” found a dramatic uptick this year in posts mentioning “grooming,” which refers to the practice of pursuing relationships with children for the purpose of sexually abusing or exploiting them.
Use of this term and related terms as a slander against LGBTQ people is an explicit violation of Twitter’s rules governing hate speech, the company said. And yet, even as the platform saw a 406% increase in such tweets beginning in March, it failed to take action in 99% of reported cases, the study shows.
Forty-eight million people viewed these tweets, the study estimates, with the majority coming from a small group of right-wing extremists, including lawmakers like U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R- Ga.).
Of the most-viewed “grooming” tweets, 66% of impressions were driven by just 10 users, the report finds.
For its part, Meta prohibits anti-LGBTQ content on Facebook and Instagram but removed only one paid advertisement mentioning the “grooming” narrative.
The findings echo CCDH’s report last year on misinformation concerning the COVID pandemic (including vaccines), the online spread of which was linked to just a dozen people with large followings on social media platforms.
“Facebook, Google and Twitter have put policies into place to prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation; yet to date, all have failed to satisfactorily enforce those policies,” CCDH’s CEO Imran Ahmed wrote in the report.
Just as with COVID, the companies’ failure to intervene and take down misinformation and hate speech can have dire consequences. “Online hate and lies reflect and reinforce offline violence and hate,” Ahmed said in a statement about the new report. “The normalization of anti-LGBTQ+ narratives in digital spaces puts LGBTQ+ people in danger.”
An old, dangerous slander is resuscitated
In the 1970s, anti-LGBTQ crusader Anita Bryant campaigned against inclusive nondiscrimination measures by spreading the lie that gay men and lesbians sought to recruit children for sexual abuse.
Passage, in March of this year, of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill – deemed the “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” bill by critics – appears to have been a turning point that led to the resuscitation of the slanderous rhetoric linking LGBTQ+ people to pedophiles or “groomers.”
The label was weaponized by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s spokesperson, Christina Pushaw, to push back against critics of the legislation, which prohibits public school teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity with students in certain grade levels.
LGBTQ advocates say non-cisgender and non-heterosexual youth will be harmed as the bill effectively erases their identities, while potentially criminalizing something as innocuous as a teacher’s mention of their same-sex spouse.
“The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay or Trans’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill,” Pushaw wrote on Twitter.
She added, “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children. Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules.”
According to the CCDH and HRC’s report, the social media platforms saw a corresponding spike in content targeting LGBTQ people as pedophiles and child abusers after DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education bill into law.
The narrative has occasionally been used to attack non-LGBTQ people, as Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow experienced at the hands of her Republican colleague Sen. Lana Theis.
McMorrow told The Los Angeles Blade there is a moral as well as a political obligation to stand up to conservative extremists who baselessly accuse LGBTQ+ people, or their political opponents, of being pedophiles or enablers of child sexual abuse.
Read the full report here.
