Social media platforms a primary source of anti-LGBTQ hatred

Walking fine line between First Amendment rights and illegal harassment

By SIMHA HADDAD

With cyberbullying at an all-time high, all states now have laws requiring schools to respond to this type of online harassment. But are those laws working? The escalating mental health crisis amongst queer youth would suggest that no, they are not.

According to a pre-covid pandemic study conducted by stopbullying.gov, about 16 percent of students in grades 9–12 nationwide experienced cyberbullying. Dosomething. org reported that approximately 37% of young people between the ages of 12 and 17 have been bullied online- with 30% experiencing incidents more than once.

Among those are a significant percentage of LGBTQIA+ youth who are consistently targets of online bullying and hate speech. In fact, the organization says that about half of all LGBTQ+ students experience online harassment — a rate higher than their cis-gender peers .

Many queer youth suffer acute mental health crises due to cyberbullying and have nowhere to turn for help and guidance. This is where Rainbow Youth Project (RYP) steps in.

All in, RYP receives an average of 300 calls per day – such a large number that they have had to triage their mental health care which Garrett told The Blade “is a big no no,” because often, the calls RYP receives are of youths in acute and immediate distress.

“We had a child just three weeks ago who was a trans girl from Louisiana,” said Garrett. “She had taken a very large quantity of various medications and all she wanted was somebody to speak to you while she went to sleep. We were able to do a welfare check immediately, and we were able to get her to the hospital. We were able to save her life.”

Many of these calls come to Garrett and his Rainbow Youth colleagues as a result of cyberbullying, which leaves these queer youths traumatized and isolated and seeing no other recourse than taking their own lives.

Garrett shared two stories with the Blade:

“Tony Vallejo was a young man who was a gay teen. His parents were very involved with the church and he had a boyfriend at that church who was his age. That boy’s parents found their text messages and outed him. They literally emailed everyone in the church and in their community that Tony was a sexual predator and trying to make their son gay.”

“Tony ended up being attacked online because people were passing this false information along. He attempted suicide twice and had four or five hospitalizations. He was so distraught over the cyberbullying that he was undergoing that he was stabbing himself with pencils just to try to get rid of this pain.”

“All of this traveled through social media. It traveled through TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. People were driving by the family’s house screaming ‘fag’ from their cars. The family couldn’t even go to a Walmart without people, saying ‘I saw online that your son is a sexual predator.’” yelling slurs. The police department had to send someone to drive by their house every fifteen to thirty minutes just to make sure the family was okay all as a result of what was posted online.”

Although Christian had been hospitalized with a concussion after the filmed beating, the false rhetoric that Christian was lying about the attack continued to spread on social media. The bullying wreaked havoc on Christian’s depression as he became more and more isolated from his peers and his community at large.

When Christian’s assailant was sentenced, the judge ordered him to do community service with an LGBTQIA+ organization in Utah. This caused even more outrage amid the homophobic community, which then began to harass the organization itself online.

“He couldn’t go outside of his house, because people were sitting across the street waiting for him to come out,” said Garrett. “All of that harassment was a result of all the things that were being posted online.”

Alarmingly, so much of this hate speech and false rhetoric on social media could have been but was not stopped by the platforms themselves.

“All these hateful comments should have violated the TOS [Terms of Service] on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Even though those things were reported, they were never removed.”

“Let’s just be honest, social media platforms do not care. They do not care,” Garrett added.

Garrett noted he recently read about a social experiment wherein a group created and submitted purposefully hateful and bigoted posts to various social media platforms as paid ads. The platforms accepted these advertisements, which used words like “groomer” and “fag.”

“The primary purpose of Rainbow Youth Project is to promote the health safety and well-being of LGBTQIA+ young people,” Michael Garrett, Communications Manager told the Blade. “Our nationwide mental health program is our core program that provides meaningful access to free, indefinite mental health counseling to LGBTQIA+ teens who otherwise would not have access to it.”

“Cyber bullying has just gone through the roof,” Garrett said. “We get hundreds of calls every day that say ‘I don’t even want to turn my phone on when I get home because now the hate follows me home. I block and they make a new account, I block, and then they make a new account. I report it and I get told that this is not a violation.’”

Sadly, Garrett said, the need for mental health crisis intervention has quickly become overwhelming.

“This past weekend we had 741 contacts to Rainbow Youth Project between Sunday morning at 8 AM and Monday morning at 8 AM. Those were all mental health needs.”

Finally, the family had to resort to leaving the state, uprooting themselves from Texas to California to save their son’s life.

“If they hadn’t moved,” said Garrett, “Tony was literally going to be a victim of his own taking.”

Christian Peacock, was another queer youth whose story went viral after RYP started working with him.

“Christian was on his front porch in his hometown in Utah hugging his boyfriend when a car was driving by and these teens started calling them all kinds of slurs. Those teens then came back and beat Christian up on his front porch. The family ran out and videotaped it. The New York Daily News reposted it, and the assailant was arrested and just a matter of 24 hours later.”

“After he was arrested, it was found that he was part of a Mormon sect. Many of that clan started posting things about Christian’s family online and calling him a liar, saying the assault didn’t happen like he said it did. This manifested into people tormenting him, very similar to the Vallejo’s, by pulling up in front of his family’s house with squealing tires,

When the group recalled these ads, explaining that they had only submitted them to test whether the platforms would accept them, the platform representatives responded claiming that they would not actually have allowed the ads to run, despite having already accepted payment for them in advance.

It is no secret that social media has become an open playing field for hate speech. So many perfectly innocuous posts get taken down for “violating” the platform’s cryptic guidelines, while others, like the ones created for the aforementioned social experiment, run rampant and unchecked by these sites.

With so many social media users frustrated at the confusing rules of what is and is not allowed to be posted, California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed AB 587, authored by Assembly Member Jesse Gabriel, into law. The new bill is designed to hold social media platforms more accountable by demanding transparency of their rules and how they intend to implement them.

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