- GLAAD’s report highlights numerous anti-transgender posts on Meta platforms, urging improved policy enforcement.
- Despite advocacy efforts, Meta’s actions remain insufficient, fueling concerns over LGBTQ+ safety.
- The report aims to spotlight Meta’s shortcomings in policy execution regarding anti-transgender hate speech.
LGBTQ advocacy organisation GLAAD released a report on Wednesday documenting dozens of anti-transgender posts on Meta‘s major social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, urging the company to better enforce policies against such posts.
The catalogued posts by GLAAD include calls for the violent extermination of transgender individuals, as well as labelling transgender and gender non-conforming people as “Satan,” “sexual predators,” and “perverts.” The report states that these posts are just a sample of the discourse monitored daily by GLAAD’s social media safety program. GLAAD claims that its efforts to persuade Meta to take more measures to curb such posts have been unsuccessful.
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Meta needs to improve the safety of transgender individuals
GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement, “For years, LGBTQ organisations have been pleading with Meta to improve the safety of transgender individuals.”
GLAAD alleges that Meta allows this anti-transgender rhetoric to spread on its platforms, fuelling offline threats and attacks against transgender individuals. “Meta itself acknowledges in its public statements and its own policies that hate speech ‘creates an intimidating and exclusionary environment that in some cases may fuel offline violence’,” GLAAD said. “This acknowledgment of culpability makes Meta’s neglect and refusal to protect people from this hate… even more shocking.”
GLAAD’s report comes at a time when many LGBTQ content creators express concerns that Meta’s new restrictions on political content, including social issues and LGBTQ+ rights, are limiting their impact.
There is an increase in transgender harassment and defamation
Alok Vaid-Menon, a non-binary content creator, writer, and comedian based in New York, who is a member of GLAAD’s Social Media Safety Advisory Council, said, “I have experienced an increase in transgender harassment, defamation, dehumanising metaphors, and violent threats.”
In September, Meta’s Oversight Board, which serves as a watchdog for the company, strongly criticised the company for failing to enforce rules against anti-transgender hatred and threats. In a ruling on the “Polish Posts Targeting Transgender Individuals” case, the board wrote, “The fundamental problem in this case is not the policy, but the enforcement of the policy. Meta has repeatedly failed to take the right enforcement actions, despite multiple signals about the harmful content of the posts, leading the board to conclude that the company has not lived up to its ideals in LGBTQIA+ safety.”
In June, LGBTQ advocacy organisation Human Rights Campaign GLAAD and over 250 LGBTQ+ celebrities, public figures, and allies signed an open letter urging Meta to better protect itself from anti-transgender hatred.
GLAAD says that nine months later, the company has still not taken sufficient action to curb abuse, hoping that the report will draw attention to Meta’s inadequate policy enforcement.
