Facebook, Instagram Allow Alt-Right Groups to Spread Hate During Pride Month
Facebook and Meta don’t have the best track record when it comes to being safe and inclusive platforms for everyone. Facebook has a rocky history of supporting alt-right ideology and political figures, and this Pride Month wasn’t any different, according to a new Media Matters report.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, celebrated Pride by releasing Pride-themed stickers, avatars, and overlays on both apps. These stickers are meant to hold together their efforts of fostering positive environments across platforms. However, when large amounts of users, groups, pages, etc. spread hate all over both apps, nothing was done to stop it.
On Facebook, alt-right pages posted 1,512 times more than left-leaning pages. The majority of the posts came from outlets like The Daily Wire, The Western Journal, and The Blaze. Outlets like these pushed for legislation to protect children from the LGBTQ community, painted the community as groomers, and demonized events like Drag Queen Story Hour. These posts got more than 78,000 interactions and were spread across a multitude of alt-right Facebook groups.
Instagram followed Facebook’s footsteps.
Large, well-known accounts like Garbage Human, with more than 180,000 followers across all accounts, and Libs of TikTok, with 200,000 followers, spread hate speech all Pride Month. Their posts earned from 7,000 to 1.5 million interactions, with TikToks and news articles alike mocking LGBTQ people.
To make matters worse, gay republicans made their own account by the name of Gays Against Groomers.
“It’s time for us to reclaim our community and show that it’s not just straight Republicans that are against this insanity,” the group says on their Twitter page. This gay alt-right group also targeted Drag Queen Story Hour and Generation Drag, claiming that these programs were made for groomers.
Although the posts made by these alt-right groups are against Meta’s policies, there wasn’t an apparent effort to take down the posts that spread hate speech and misinformation, especially for the posts that were widely circulated and got high levels of interaction.
It’s hard to believe that apps like Facebook and Instagram are working hard to be positive spaces for people when hate speech is accepted and welcomed by the algorithms of these apps without any consequences.
Photo courtesy of Facebook
