Human rights group says Meta endangers queer Middle Easterners & urges big changes to keep them safe

The international organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — X, and Grindr to implement changes to help stop the persecution of LGBTQ+ Middle Easterners and North Africans by their government’s legal authorities.

HRW listed the changes at the end of its report entitled, “Digital Targeting and Its Offline Consequences for LGBT People in the Middle East and North Africa.” The report details how authorities in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia monitor social media, create fake profiles to impersonate LGBTQ+ people on the platforms, and then use them to entrap, arrest, detain, torture, and blackmail other queer individuals. This mistreatment further marginalizes queer people, causing some of them to hide in fear, flee their home countries, or even kill themselves to end the abuse.

Related:

Jordan cracks down on LGBTQ+ activists with kidnappings, forced outings & online threats

“Merely existing in Amman has become terrifying.”

“While digital platforms have offered an efficient and accessible way to appeal to public opinion and expose rights violations, enabling LGBT people to express themselves and amplify their voices, they have also become tools for state-sponsored repression,” HRW wrote. The group noted that activists and transgender people were the most visible online, leaving them most vulnerable to digital targeting because of overlapping forms of stigma, discrimination, and a lack of legal protections.

Global perspectives delivered right to your inbox

Our newsletter bridges borders to bring you LGBTQ+ news from around the world.

Daily

Weekly

Good News

HRW encouraged Meta and other social media platforms to exhibit full transparency regarding resources directed toward user safety and hate content moderation. This includes content moderators who are proficient in Arabic, which is widely spoken throughout the region, and those trained on the digital targeting of vulnerable groups and their human rights implications.

HRW also encouraged social media platforms to consult with LGBTQ+ users as well as organizations defending LGBTQ+ and digital rights to develop policies and user features that prioritize the concerns of queer people. Chiefly, the HRW advised social media platforms to establish direct lines of communication that would allow moderators to respond rapidly when identifying and removing digital threats.

Examples of digital targeting by legal authorities

To compile its report, HRW interviewed 45 gay men, 27 transgender women, 15 lesbian women, 2 gender non-binary people, and 1 bisexual person about the abuses they experienced. All 90 interviewees said they practice self-censorship online and reported suffering consequences ranging from online harassment to arbitrary arrest and prosecution. HRW’s report also detailed abuses happening in other neighboring Middle Eastern and North African countries.

In Morocco, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, people created fake accounts on same-sex dating applications and then circulated photos and personal details of other users. This forcibly outed many queer people, causing some to flee their homes and live on the street since others wouldn’t shelter them during the mandatory quarantine.

In June 2022, an anti-LGBTQ+ campaign known as Fetrah (Arabic for “instinct”) went viral on Facebook and Twitter, opposing “the promotion of homosexuality and its symbols” and promoting violence against queer people. While Meta suspended the campaign’s page shortly after its creation, it remained active on Twitter with over 75,000 followers until it was eventually suspended six months later.

Mohamad Al-Bokari, a 31-year-old Yemeni refugee living in Saudi Arabia, fled armed groups who threatened to kill him due to his online activism and gender non-conformity, HRW wrote. Saudi officials arrested him, sentenced him to 10 months in prison, fined him 10,000 riyals ($2,700), held him in solitary confinement, repeatedly beat him to compel him to “confess that he is gay,” and forced him to undergo forced anal examinations, a humiliating form of sexual torture that is often used to “prove” men’s homosexuality, even though such examinations can’t prove the occurrence of anal intercourse.

Maha al-Mutairi, a 40-year-old Kuwaiti transgender woman, was sentenced to 2 years in prison and a fine of 1,000 dinars ($3,315) for allegedly “misusing phone communication” and “imitating the opposite sex” online. Prosecutors used her social media videos to convict her. The videos showed her wearing makeup, discussing her trans identity, allegedly making “sexual advances,” and criticizing the government. During her imprisonment, prison guards verbally abused, sexually assaulted, and spit on her.

Other authorities meet with LGBTQ+ people in public, detaining them and then unlawfully searching their personal devices, often under threat of violence. Using these devices, authorities collect or create private information that’ll enable them to prosecute the detainee and their suspected LGBTQ+ associates.

“When police officers could not find [queer] digital information at the time of arrest, they downloaded same-sex dating applications on their phones, uploaded photos, and fabricated chats to justify their detention,” HRW wrote.

Detainees were often jailed under vague, trumped-up “morality,” “debauchery,” “prostitution,” “terrorism,” and “cybercrime” charges. Once detailed, they were interrogated; denied access to lawyers, visitors, or medical care; abused; assaulted; tortured; and forced to sign confessions. Others were extorted and blackmailed — either by police or local gangs — into paying money or acting as informants, lest they be outed to their families and others. 

Former detainees often lost their jobs, suffered familial violence, and were forced into conversion practices. They also faced post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, suicidal ideation as well as harassment and monitoring by officials for years afterward. Some LGBTQ+ locals completely deleted their social media profiles, changed their residences and phone numbers, or fled their home countries to avoid future harassment, resulting in a lack of LGBTQ+ visibility, community, and activism in local communities.

Authorities and gang members do this all with impunity, and victims are reluctant to report these activities over fear that they’ll face anti-LGBTQ+ harassment as a result.