A new report by Human Rights Watch has revealed how security agencies and government officials in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa have been using social media platforms and mobile dating apps to crack down on the LGBTQ community. The report documents dozens of cases of security agencies in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Tunisia extorting, harassing, publicly outing, and detaining LGBTQ people based on their activities on Facebook, Instagram, and the queer dating app Grindr. The report also questions major tech companies for not investing sufficiently in Arabic language content moderation and protection.
For years, the LGBTQ community in the region has relied on online platforms for safety and privacy to sidestep oppression and discrimination due to social stigma and laws that criminalize their expression. However, these findings expose digital methods of clamping down on the community, which have resulted in ill-treatment, sexual assault, and suicide attempts. In some cases, private individuals and gangs have also been involved in the extortion.
While Human Rights Watch has called on governments to respect LGBTQ rights and end the criminalization of their expression, they have also urged major tech companies, notably Meta, Twitter, and Grindr, to invest in stronger Arabic-language content moderation and respond more proactively to these incidents. Rasha Younes, a senior researcher with the LGBT Rights Program at HRW, has criticized the lack of transparency on the content moderation process of these tech companies. She emphasized that the policies meant to account for hate speech for everyone show “inequity in moderating content” in the Middle East and North Africa.
