Associated Press Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Major social media platforms such as Tiktok, Instagram and X have been unable to protect LGBTQ+ users from hatred and harassment as they intentionally rolled back their previous safety practices.
The report states that the recent “unprecedented hate speech policy rollback” from the Instagram and Facebook parent meta platform and Google’s YouTube “actively undermine the safety of LGBTQ people” both online and offline. Meta rollback allows users to call LGBTQ people “mental disorders.”
The scorecard assigns numerical ratings to each platform regarding LGBTQ safety, privacy and representation. Elon Musk’s X scored the lowest score at 30 out of 100, while Tiktok was the best at 56. I was in my 40s on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Google’s YouTube. The group’s methodology has changed since last year, so the scores are not directly comparable to previous reports.
“At the rise in real-world violence and harassment against LGBTQ people, social media companies are profiting from the flames of anti-LGBTQ hatred, instead of ensuring the basic safety of LGBTQ users.”
X has received its lowest score since Musk acquired the platform known as Twitter in 2022, but Meta’s backslide could be heavily attributed to recent policy changes. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January that Meta is removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, citing “recent elections” as a catalyst. Glaad calls the rollback “particularly extreme.”
Representatives of Meta, Tiktok and X did not immediately respond to the message for comments Monday afternoon.
Glaad said Google recently removed “gender identities and expressions” from YouTube’s list of protected trait groups. This suggests that the platform “does not protect transgender, non-binary, genderless people from hatred and discrimination.”
Google says it’s not the case.
“At the beginning of the year, we confirmed that our hate speech policy has not changed. We have a strict policy on content that promotes hatred and violence against members of the LGBTQ+ community, and we are still wary of efforts to detect and delete this content quickly,” Google said in a statement.
Glaad has confirmed Google’s statement, but the organization emphasizes that gender identity has not been restored as a protected characteristic on YouTube’s hate speech policy page.
“YouTube must reverse this dangerous policy change and update its “hate speech” policy to explicitly include gender identity and expression as protected characteristics,” the report states.
The GLAAD report has made policy recommendations for protecting LGBTQ users, but given that many people have rolled back such protections, it is unclear whether the platform will take these. For example, Glaad says the platform should protect LGBTQ people from hatred, harassment and violence, ban targeted misconceptions and “denaming” among trans users, and explain the steps necessary to accidentally delete or demonstrate legitimate accounts and content related to LGBTQ topics.
Original issue: May 13th, 2025, 12:15pm EDT
