LGBTQ+ advocates have expressed alarm in recent weeks, as Meta has taken steps to undermine protections for queer youth and apparently worked to appease the incoming conservative administration in Washington.
Meta, the parent company of popular social media and messaging companies Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is owned by Mark Zuckerberg, who was once considered to be an ally of the LGBTQ+ community.
A week ago, the internet was afire with discussion of Liv, the now-deleted Instagram profile of a “proud black Queer momma of 2” AI made by Meta as part of its AI user dreams.
Then, last week, independent tech journalist Taylor Lorenz revealed that Instagram had been blocking teens from searching LGBTQ+-related content for months.
This comes as no surprise to Celia Fisher, a professor of Psychology and the Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics at Fordham University who has spent her career studying children and adolescent health, especially for marginalized groups like the LGBTQ+ community.
When speaking to the Washington Blade in November 2024 on TikTok, Fisher remarked that it was increasingly difficult to research the Meta platforms. Fisher and her team have used advertisements on social media to recruit youth for anonymous surveys for studies. “One of the advantages of social media is that you can reach a national audience,” she says.
The advertisements are specifically linked to keywords and popular celebrities to reach LGBTQ+ populations of youth. When she spoke to the Blade again this week, she was not surprised to hear that keywords were being blocked from youth. “Now, there is a major barrier to being able to recruit when you are doing online studies.”
It makes her research—which has looked at the mental health of youth online, HIV prevention strategies, and COVID vaccine barriers—impossible. “If Meta prevents researchers from using the platform, then the research can’t be done,” she said.
The search blocks are not just a threat to the research, they are a threat to youth. “Hiding those terms from youth means they can’t see that there is a community out there. That’s a tremendous loss, especially for transgender youth,” said Fisher.
Fisher suspects where the restrictions are coming from, not that Zuckerberg has been particularly opaque as he cozies up to the new administration. “I think there’s been a creeping fear on the part of companies not to do anything that might elicit the ire of more conservative politicians,” she said.
A Meta spokesperson told Lorenz that the restriction was a mistake. “It’s important to us that all communities feel safe and welcome on Meta apps, and we do not consider LGBTQ+ terms to be sensitive under our policies,” said the spokesperson.
Meta backtracked immediately; the next day the company removed longstanding anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech policies.
Zuckerberg announced large changes to the platform via video in which he sported a $900,000 watch. (More than 1 in 5 LGBTQ+ adults are living in poverty. More than 1 in 3 transgender adults are living in poverty.)
The changes, which eliminate independent fact-checking for a system similar to X’s “community notes,” have been highly critiqued by journalists and fact-checking organizations. Many experts see it as a “bow” to Trump.
Zuckerberg also noted that the platform would “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He directly linked the changes to the recent election.
Those changes happened quickly. That same day GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ media monitoring non-profit, reported the changes to the hateful conduct policies. Changes include allowances for calling LGBTQ+ people mentally ill and the removal of prohibitions against the dehumanization of protected groups, among many. Notably, Meta’s guidelines include the right-wing transphobic dog whistle “transgenderism.”
On Jan. 9, reporting from The Intercept and Platformer on internal training documents revealed the use of even more slurs. The t-slur against transgender people is now allowed on the sites with no restrictions. Phrases like—and this is a quoted example—”A trans person isn’t a he or she, it’s an it” are allowed on the sites with no restrictions.
“I shudder to think what these changes will mean for our youth.”
Arturo Béjar
Notably, the training manuals differentiate between different members of the LGBTQ+ community. For example, The Intercept found that the phrase “Lesbians are so stupid” would be prohibited while “trans people are mentally ill” would not be.
(These training manuals also include permissive use of racist and dehumanizing language for other marginalized groups.)
And then, as a cherry on top, Meta removed DEI programs and deleted the transgender and non-binary Messenger themes, on Jan. 10.
These changes are undeniably bad. Arturo Béjar, a former engineering director at Meta with expertise in online harassment, told the Associated Press, he is horrified by the changes.
“I shudder to think what these changes will mean for our youth, Meta is abdicating their responsibility to safety, and we won’t know the impact of these changes because Meta refuses to be transparent about the harms teenagers experience, and they go to extraordinary lengths to dilute or stop legislation that could help,” he said.
Fisher, who has researched the effects of hate speech online on LGBTQ+ youths’ mental health, agrees that the results will be devastating. “We had many people who said they observed transgender harassment for others or were actually attacked themselves,” said Fisher. “This prevents people from wanting to come out online and to actually engage in those kinds of online communities that might be helpful to them.”
What is happening also confirms LGBTQ+ youths’ worst fears. “We’ve found that a major concern is that there would be an increased violation of civil rights and increased violence against LGBTQ individuals,” she said.
Fisher, a psychologist, sees this as “putting us back into the dark ages of psychiatry and psychology when LGBTQ individuals were seen as having some kind of a mental health problem or disorder.”
Fisher emphasized: “This kind of misinformation about mental illness is certainly going to be putting transgender people, especially at even greater risk than they were before.”
This story is part of the Digital Equity Local Voices Fellowship lab through News is Out. The lab initiative is made possible with support from Comcast NBCUniversal.