On Wednesday, the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD released a report detailing dozens of anti-trans posts on Meta’s main social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, and urging the company to better maintain its anti-trans posts policies.
Some of the comments were made by well-known political figures and publications.
Articles cataloged by GLAAD included calling for the harsh eradication of transgender individuals as well as descriptions of transgender and gender nonconforming people as “satanic,” “physical predators,” “terrorists,” “mentally poor,” and “perverts”. According to the report, the posts are just a sampling of the language that GLAAD’s social media protection program monitors daily. GLAAD claimed that its efforts to persuade Meta to do more to damp down these articles were fruitless.
“For decades, LGBTQ organizations have pleaded with Meta to improve health for our communities, particularly for trans people,” Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD’s president and CEO, said in a statement. We continue to demand that Meta discuss a plan to address the illness of anti-trans hate and violence on its systems as Gay citizens and other marginalized communities continue to suffer real-world harms as a result of these anti-LGBT accounts with large followings.
GLAAD claimed that Meta’s ability to spread anti-trans speech on its system contributes to online assaults and strikes on trans people. In a speech about the statement, GLAAD said that Meta itself acknowledges in its open statements and in its own policies that love talk” creates an environment of coercion and exclusion” and that in some cases, it may advertise offline violence. “These acknowledgments of its own guilt make Meta’s carelessness and refusal to defend people from such hate all the more shocking.”
Many LGBTQ content authors report that their approach is being constrained by Meta’s new limitations on political information, including LGBTQ+ rights and social issues. Alok Vaid-Menon, an intersex content creator, author, and comedian in New York who is on GLAAD’s cultural media safety program consulting committee, said, “I have experienced an uptick of insect-trans harassment, slurs, dehumanizing tropes, and aggressive threats. I brought this up to Meta plenty of times, and the response that we’re always given is, you know, you can block these individuals”.
“There’s a failure to recognize that this is a systemic problem,” Vaid-Menon added. “Rather than on the perpetrators of this violence who are directly violating Meta’s own preexisting policies,” the onus is on individual users to block.
In September, Facebook’s Oversight Board, which acts as Meta’s ombudsman, lambasted the company’s failure to enforce rules against anti-trans hate and threats. The board stated in a decision regarding an incident referred to as “Post in Polish Targeting Trans People” that “the fundamental issue in this case is not the policies but their enforcement.” The Board is led to believe that Meta is not upholding the ideals it has set forth regarding LGBTQIA+ safety by repeatedly failing to take the appropriate enforcement action despite numerous indications about the post’s harmful content.
Meta acknowledged in a statement from February that its monitors had mistaken when they did not take enforcement action against the post. “Upon initial review, Meta left this content up. However, upon further review, we determined the content did in fact violate our policy on Hate Speech, as laid out in the Facebook Community Standards, and was left up in error. We therefore removed the content”, the company said.
And in June, GLAAD, the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, and more than 250 LGBTQ+ celebrities, public figures, and allies signed an open letter calling on Meta to do a better job of protecting against anti-trans hate. False portrayals of trans people being “groomers” and sexual predators were cited in the letter as the source of an escalating harassment of prominent trans and non-binary figures on Instagram. Celebrities including Elliot Page, Laverne Cox, Jamie Lee Curtis, Shawn Mendes, Janelle Monáe, Gabrielle Union, Judd Apatow, and Ariana Grande signed the letter.
GLAAD claimed that the business still hasn’t taken enough steps to stop the abuse nine months later. Through its standard reporting tools, GLAAD representatives found no violations of any of the posts they reported to Meta, or no one took any action against them.
A transgender’s body is depicted in a photo on Instagram that was referenced in the report as being twisted on the ground while being brutally murdered with stones, which have since been replaced with the laughing emoji. The caption reads: “trans flag people are devils”.
A far-right group with 1.7 million followers, Media Research Center, posted an hour-long video that the report also cited. In the video, Brittany Hughes, the host of the “Brittany Hughes Show” podcast, which has 3.2 million followers on Facebook, describes trans people as pedophiles “grooming children”.
Right-wing media outlets and podcasters — including Matt Walsh, the account Gays Against Groomers, Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok, and the Babylon Bee — contributed to anti-trans hate, according to the report.
GLAAD said it hopes the report draws Meta’s attention to its insufficient enforcement of the company’s policies.
