Homophobia, LGBTQ Hate Speech, and Social Media
By: James Finn
Tags: Activism, Equality, LGBTQ, Social Media, Human Rights

Homophobia, LGBTQ Hate Speech, and Social Media

Speaking truth to power today is as difficult as ever

Photo by by Bennian on Shutterstock

The Internet was supposed to free society from the gatekeeping of traditional journalism. Blogging and self publishing were going to be the answer to media that wore blinders of convention. Free flowing, dynamic truth sharing was going to rock the world.

Instead, as many people now understand, the Internet and social media have constructed de facto echo chambers in which people of like mind gather to share information mostly free of challenging thought. And woe to those who fight to crack those chamber walls!

My story about LGBTQ activism helps illustrate the problem.

As an LGBTQ advocate, I promote writing all over social media, so I’m in a pretty good position to observe the difficulties inherent in challenging echo chamber mentality. I’ve just seen my own writing characterized as “hate speech,” and I’ve seen my reach severely limited. I understand what the dangers of forced conformity are, because I live them.

An object lesson in conformity

Even though I do all my LGBTQ advocacy writing on Medium.com for convenience and simplicity, I share my work all over. My stories have appeared in the Good Men Project, Pink News, and LGBTQ Nation. NPR is featuring one of my articles next month. Mostly though, I promote on Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes, my stories reach a fairly large audience.

Defying popular narrative

I’m not saying that to boast, I’m trying to explain that I write about an important, niche issue that matters enormously to me and to other members of gender and sexual minorities. I work hard to share difficult information a lot of people aren’t aware of. I want folks to know that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the US and other places are suffering — in ways that often defy popular narrative.

Calling out religious groups

I often observe that organized religion acts as a primary, driving force of homophobic bigotry. Common narrative on the Left holds that religious forces in the US reflect societal homophobia rather than causing it. I think that narrative is wrong, and I often write about that, citing studies and stats that back me up. I don’t claim I’m indisputably correct, only that my position is reasonable on its face and supported by facts. Here’s an example:

In this story, which I’ve written to directly address Christian pastors and priests, I call for faith leaders to examine their faith in the light of increasing human knowledge about sexual orientation and gender identity. I also spell out my position on homophobia — that religion causes it rather than reflects it.

Unfortunately, because of recent developments, I’ve been unable to put that story in front of many people.

Muzzled on Facebook

I’m increasingly finding my voice muffled on social media, sometimes on Twitter, but especially and frequently on Facebook. In order to amplify my voice, I often post in the name of very highly subscribed, very popular Facebook pages. The people who run those pages have made me an editor, so when I post, I post as the page rather than as myself.

Sometimes that means that my story announcements go out to very large numbers of people, sometimes tens of thousands, sometimes many more than that.

Last week, one of those Facebook pages saw a sudden freeze in readership. Numbers plummeted. Nobody could figure out what was happening. So the owner hired a social media marketing consultant and brought him into the page as an editor to find out what was happening.

Facebook labeled my writing as hate speech

The consultant poked around, reached out to contacts inside Facebook and quickly discovered that the problem was me and my writing. Facebook had marked one of my articles as “hate speech” and classified me a source of unreliable (fake) news.

The only answer the consultant had was to remove me as an editor of the page, delete all my content, and hope for the best. And after about 5 minutes of “agonized” thought, that’s exactly what the page managers did.

I can’t really even blame them. Posts were reaching only hundreds of people instead of tens of thousands. Facebook had choked off their reach, and unless they got rid of my writing, it would stay choked.

A choking chain reaction

The LGBTQ world on Facebook is insular. Leading groups and pages are interlocked in many ways. After a few hours the messages started rolling in. Could I please stop posting stories in their group, or at least limit stories to topics that didn’t touch on politics or religion? I found my administrator or editor status revoked on other groups and pages without explanation. My posts stopped being approved in some groups where I didn’t have pre-approval.

Facebook effectively silenced me, and for a very reasonable article

What do you think I was writing about that got labeled as hate speech? I must have called Christians some names, right? I must have bashed Catholics by sneering about their sex abuse scandal. I must have called religion inherently evil.

No, you’d be wrong. I never write anything like that. I avoid cheap smears like the plague. Instead, I quoted some statistics about religiously-based homophobia in a long, detailed response to neocon James Kirchick’s June article in The Atlantic, in which he asserts that the struggle for “gay rights” is over.

Here is the passage from my story the consultant suggests pulled Facebook’s hate-speech trigger:

Besides geography, Kirchick leaves out some crucial demographic data from that same Pew study. — 52% of all men in the United States believe “homosexuality” should be discouraged. — 59% of all Republicans believe “homosexuality” should be discouraged. —A whopping 71% of white, evangelical Protestants believe “homosexuality” should be discouraged. —39% of all Americans say they would be “upset” if they discovered their child were gay. — 59% of Republicans say they would be “upset” if they discovered their child were gay. — 65% of white, evangelical Protestants say they would be “upset” if they discovered their child were gay. — 60% of Black Protestants say they would be “upset” if they discovered their child were gay. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are attacking LGBT rights Astonishingly, Kirchick seems to claim otherwise, writing that while “Donald Trump built his campaign upon resentment of various minority groups, gay people were conspicuously not among them.”

Avoid politics and don’t criticize religion, the consultant told us

“All the biggest, most successful LGBT-themed pages on Facebook focus on positive messaging. Once you start including messages that offend people, Facebook is going to restrict your reach. That’s just how it works.”

So, the page is chugging along now with popular memes. “Love is love!” proclaim happy, diverse faces set against backgrounds that glisten in rainbow colors. Cheery people hold up simplified diagrams that explain what gender identity means, how sexual attraction can differ from romantic attraction, how queer kids need support.

Positive messaging matters, but so does critical thinking

Missing now from that page is my more sober presence, offering up food for thought to fellow activists:

Religion is no excuse for homophobia.

Religious teachings are killing us. Stop it.

Calling LGBTQ people depraved, disordered, or sinful is hate speech, no matter what your religion tells you.

Faith doesn’t justify homophobic bigotry any more than it justifies racist bigotry. Homophobic bigots must be given the same social cold shoulder most people reserve for racist bigots.

Financially or materially supporting religious organizations that teach homophobia is morally compromising and harmful.

Parents and churches must not enjoy the automatic right to indoctrinate children with homophobia. Queer kids have the human right to grow up healthy.

All of those topics and more matter deeply to LGBTQ people. All of them are controversial on both the Left and the Right for various reasons. All of them need to be discussed in the public square. That’s often not possible given the constraints of today’s social media environment.

Provocative points of view aren’t literally deleted. You can find them if you search hard enough, but they’re often suppressed, as my story announcements are frequently suppressed on Facebook and sometimes on Twitter.

I find it ironic that my stories, which call out hate speech and ideas that result in actual harm to LGBTQ people, are characterized as hate speech. I find it ironic that so many people find truth telling offensive.

Speaking truth to power has always been a fraught exercise in the United States. The majority have always worked hard to stifle the voices of the persecuted and oppressed crying out for liberty and justice.

The Internet was supposed to change that, but very little progress has been made. The old media gatekeepers have stepped aside for a new breed who work just as hard to prevent societal boats from rocking.

The means have changed, but the effect remains largely the same. If we want that to change, we need to raise our voices and demand that media forces stop suppressing difficult conversations.