Digital Life
Yes, Social Media is Terrible — Unless You’re Young and Queer
Weighing a new GLAAD report against the queer experience
I’m worried — but not for reasons you might think.
Last month saw the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) release its first-ever Social Media Safety Index. As CEO Sarah Kate Ellis notes in the report’s press release, the original intention of the research was to grade five of the most popular social media platforms on safety and inclusion for queer people. When researchers realized their criteria would lead to every platform receiving a failing grade, they reworked the results into more of an industry report with recommendations for improvement.
The report is a call-to-arms to big tech, a public accountability maneuver backed by data. It’s a tried-and-true formula for GLAAD, having created similar structures for journalism and television, and historically it works — particularly when GLAAD measures year over year change.
My worry is that the tagline “no social media platform is safe for queer people” will be what sticks and gets decontextualized from all of this. Social media is unsafe, sure, and there’s the added side effect that too much screen time can change our brains.
