Hi, it’s Fortune’s tech fellow Andrea Guzman filling in for David.
GLAAD, a nonprofit that advocates for queer communities, released its annual Social Media Safety Index, finding that five major platforms fail to mitigate hate and disinformation surrounding LGBTQ communities. The platforms also disproportionately suppress LGBTQ content through removal, demonetization, and forms of shadowbanning, which is when platforms hide or restrict a user’s content without informing them.
GLAAD measured things like protections for LGBTQ users from harassment and prohibiting advertising that could be harmful or discriminatory to LGBTQ people, and gave each platform a score based on how well it adhered to the criteria. No platform scored 100%, but some did significantly better than others:
Instagram: 63%
Facebook: 61%
TikTok: 57%
YouTube: 54%
Twitter: 33%
All of the platforms made improvements from the year before, except for one.
Twitter has been barreling toward this rating for a while. In April, the company’s hateful conduct policy had a line removed that prevented “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” And as my colleague Stephen Pastis reported, flagged posts containing racist, homophobic, and other abusive content weren’t taken down by Twitter for several days after being flagged as offensive. The posts were shared by Twitter users with a blue check mark, which comes with the perk of prioritized ranking in conversations and search.
GLAAD also called out Elon Musk’s own posts on the platform. Most recently, he faced backlash for a tweet on the first day of Pride Month, saying he personally uses the pronouns that people prefer, but that the policy wouldn’t be enforced on Twitter.
But it’s not just Twitter that faced scrutiny under the report.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, was lauded for its strong policies but found to not enforce them consistently.
For example, GLAAD noted that in April 2023, the organization informed Meta of anti-trans hate posted by Instagram accounts, but received an explanation through an automated in-app reporting system that “because of the high volume of reports we receive, our team hasn’t been able to review this post.”
GLAAD called the instance “gravely concerning.” Meta said in a prepared statement that it works with “civil society organizations around the world in our work to design policies and create tools that foster a safe online environment.”
This all comes as Meta prepares to launch a Twitter competitor. And, as GLAAD notes, during a year that has seen “an unprecedented surge of hateful, violent, and false rhetoric hurled at LGBTQ people both on and offline.”
While it’s unclear when Meta’s Twitter challenger will arrive, it will face a tough challenge of improving its content moderation strategy not just on Facebook and Instagram, but also on the coming "Threads" app.
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Andrea Guzman
