[Karawebnetwork]

I moderate four LGBTQIA+ communities and support spaces on Facebook, totaling over 395k members. I cover both my local scene and international communities.

Without the online spaces, most members wouldn't have friends. The bulk of the work is managing the news feeds and the main task is to approve posts individually. So we see them all.

Many would otherwise be totally isolated. Teens in rural America are among the most affected by this isolation. Many users create threads describing their lack of support in their physical lives or thanking the online spaces for existing, stating that prior to their presence on the group, they had no support network.

While the population of LGBTQIA+ people is concentrated in urban areas, they are primarily adults who have the freedom to move around. Teens are stuck in their hometowns and can only move around after they reach adulthood and connect or build support networks online. As you said, the US population is around 5.6% but even states like Alabama still have 3.0%. This demographic is especially relevant in this topic as its suicide rates are higher that the country's average, with trans people (without support) having rates that go as high as 40 to 50%. Online spaces provide enough support to reduce that number significantly.

There is a meme that goes something like:

"Why are you on Facebook? It's for older people. - It's because your friends aren't queer."

The LGBTQIA+ internet is similar to what the internet was in the 90s. Close-knit communities where everyone knows each other, sub-communities, sub-cultures, and lots of blogs and personal sites.

I would even go so far as to say that comparing the average social network usage to LGBTQIA+ social network usage is the equivalent of comparing apples and oranges.

[GhettoComputers]

Thank you for your perspective. Do you think that the LGBTQIA+ community is best served in this method? For instance, art communities would have been a stand in for many before, and from my exposure it seems to have had very good effects for marginalized people who aren't mainstream due to interests, sexual orientation, or creativity and ideas that are normally dismissed. They seem to be the least polarized people I know of.

I have a question for my friend: he is bisexual so he has problems where he is invalidated by both hetero and non hetero communities, and feels very isolated and depressed, and I don't know enough to help, where do you suggest is the best place for him to get support or any resources for bisexual men?

My experience with tumblr was a very mixed bag for the non heterosexual communities such as the mixture of mental health as a focal point where some I knew got better and some got worst and self diagnosed themselves into deeper unhappiness.

[Karawebnetwork]

> Do you think that the LGBTQIA+ community is best served in this method?

Ideally, there would be dedicated spaces because the existing spaces are generally very hostile. For example, it is common for people to create fake profiles in order to get past the first layer of verification (looking at the profile and reading the required questions). Once in, they take pleasure in contacting members to push them to suicide. Online trolling with real dangers.

There is also the fact that the mission of the platform is generally not very compatible or at least the lack of attention to the LGBTQIA+ communities creates such negative experiences.

For example, Facebook's automatic moderation detects ordinary slurs but not targeted homophobic or transphobic slurs or "dogwhistles." This often results in a troll using something like "you'll never be a woman" or calling transgender people "the 41%" or "join the 41%" (in direct reference to suicide rates).

Understandably, users get frustrated and tell these users to go away using harsh words, and also report the troll to Facebook. What usually happens is that automatic moderation does not detect the troll, responding that the comments do not violate their terms of service. However, "griefers" often report legitimate users. The recent changes make this very easy, as something as innocent as writing "why is this man here?" in a space dedicated to lesbians will be flagged as hate speech against a gender identity. Thus, the troll gets away with it and the users are banned for 30 days by the platform. Often, a troll can manage to flag enough comments to have entire groups shut down by the automatic moderation tools.

This makes these spaces unsafe for supporting vulnerable people. For example, one public page that I have access to the admin panel has such a large ban list that I'm not able to get the exact number without the admin page crashing. By playing with the APIs, I was able to get a count of 25k bans before it also crashed and returned errors.

But as you said, alternative sites can be just as dangerous. Sites like Tumblr quickly become echo chambers and a race to the bottom. They've been very helpful in providing a space, but the lack of oversight makes them potentially dangerous.

To answer your question about your friend, bisexuals are often one of the least supported and understood demographic groups. This brings us back to my earlier point about echo chambers. It is common for subcommunities to gather around hate, and the LGBTQIA+ community is no exception. There are many spaces where otherwise queer people gather to denigrate bi identities, invalidating entire labels because they don't take the time to understand them properly. I would argue that there are also a number of people who do this to make themselves feel better. "Finally someone I punch down to". Even the queer articles and literature of the 70s were hostile to bi people.

This is one of the many reasons I think there needs to be better LGBTQIA+ spaces. Moderation is important, but so is free speech. It is a fine line to walk. But one thing that's sure is that 90's style "free for all" internet can be very harmful for kids.

[908B64B197]

> or calling transgender people "the 41%" or "join the 41%" (in direct reference to suicide rates).

That's completely messed up.

[Karawebnetwork]

It is, and it's rampant.

[GhettoComputers]

Wouldn't you just see ingroup hatred then? Do you have any suggestions for my friend or a group for him to belong to?

[tomlin]

I do think that communities and social media aren't necessarily the same. Communities have existed before social media. I grew up on CompuServe, which had a few LGBT groups as far back as 1997, and forums chat rooms have been around for as long as that. "Social media" in these terms, tends to be surrounding anonymous behavior and how people abuse anonymous behavior to hurt and even cause physical harm - which has similar effects in your communities. We can shun the daily posting, swipe-right, anonymous aspects of social media without removing communities - as proven by their existence prior to social media.

[_bfhp]

That "40 to 50%" trans statistic is incredibly worrying. Can you share where it's from so I can reference it in the future when these discussions come up?

[Karawebnetwork]

It sounds worrying, and it is. But it's important to make one distinction.

It's not "transgender people inherently have a 40% suicide rate". It's "transgender people are in situations where their suicide rates climb to as high as 40%".

It's also important to understand the difference between "suicide ideation" and "suicide attempts" which are two different numbers that are often mixed up.

- https://www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/...

- https://issuu.com/trevorproject/docs/talking_about_suicide_a...

To answer your question, here is a source I am familiar with as a Canadian:

"Among trans Ontarians, 35.1 % [...] seriously considered [...] and 11.2 % attempted, suicide in the past year."

"Lower [...] transphobia [...] was associated with a 66 % reduction in ideation [...] and an additional 76 % reduction in attempts among those with ideation."

- https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...

US numbers are higher: the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS) found that 41% of 6,450 transgender respondents said they had attempted suicide. I don't have the source other than a PDF saved on my local machine, but you should be able to find it easily enough.

It's also very important to look at the sample pool of such studies. I remember that one number that was widely used in debates was actually done on the transgender women population of a men's prison in south america. Of course the people there are miserable but the numbers won't be representative of the larger population. It stopped being used as much after people pointed out that fact.

[_bfhp]

Was the 2008 NTDS for all ages or just adults? Did it control for mental health? Does asking a single question about attempts without follow-up interviewing ("Have you ever attempted suicide?") have any effect on the reliability of the data? [1] Why say "40 to 50%"? How can a rate "go as high as" 40% to 50% -- do you mean, when you add more variables besides identifying as trans?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170326131846/http://williamsin...