Rise in anti-LGBTQ speech spurs fears of more violence
In the days after a gunman killed five people at a gay nightclub in Colorado last month, much of social media lit up with the now familiar expressions of grief, mourning and disbelief.
But on some online message boards and platforms, the tone was celebratory. “I love waking up to great news,” wrote one user on Gab, a platform popular with far-right groups. Other users on the site called for more violence.
The hate isn’t limited to fringe sites. On Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, researchers and LGBTQ advocates have tracked an increase in hate speech and threats of violence directed at LGBTQ people, groups and events, with much of it directed at transgender people.
The content comes after conservative lawmakers in several states introduced dozens of anti-LGBTQ measures and amid a wave of threats targeting LGBTQ groups, as well as hospitals, health care workers, libraries and private businesses that support them.
“I don’t think people understand the state of danger that we’re living in right now,” said Jay Brown, senior vice president at the Human Rights Campaign and a transgender man. “A lot of that is happening online, and online threats are turning into threats of real violence offline.”
Hospitals in Boston, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., and other cities have received bomb threats and other harassing messages after misleading claims spread online about transgender care programs.
In Tennessee, masked members of a white supremacist group showed up recently at a holiday charity event at a bookstore because
the evening’s entertainment included a drag performer. An upcoming holiday party at an adults-only gay nightclub was also the subject of threats. The party’s theme? Ugly Christmas sweaters.
“And they’re still coming after us? It’s just straight up bigotry and hatred at this point,” said Jessica Patterson, one of the organizers of the event, who noted that groups calling for violence against LGBTQ groups often espouse other bigotries, too.
The transphobic content targeting events such as Patterson’s is just a subset of the hateful content about Jews, Muslims, women, Black people, Asians and others that has internet safety advocates and an increasing number of lawmakers in the United States and elsewhere pushing for tougher regulations that would force tech companies to do more.
There’s no simple explanation for the increase in hate speech documented by researchers in recent years. Socio-economic stress caused by the pandemic, increased political polarization and resurgent far-right movements have all been blamed. So have politicians such as Donald Trump, whose brash use of social media emboldened extremists online.
“I’ve been tracking hatefueled extremist communities for more than 25 years but I’ve never seen hate speech — let alone the calls for violence that they spark — reach the volume they have now,” extremism researcher Rita Katz wrote in an email to The Associated Press.
Katz is co-founder of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors far-right internet sites and has identified dozens of threats against LGBTQ groups and events in the U.S. in recent months. SITE released a bulletin Thursday detailing death threats against drag performers after one appeared at the White House bill signing of the Respect for Marriage Act.
Online hate speech has been linked to offline violence in the past, and many of the perpetrators of recent mass shootings were later found to be immersed in online worlds of bigotry and conspiracy theories.