Jan 10, 2023
Anti-Trans Panic Online
On various fringe platforms, anti-trans panic narratives have been gaining popularity since 2016, though they have a much older history.
Introduction
Posts and activity on fringe platforms like Gab and 4chan frequently encourage trans harassment; for its part, activity on Kiwi Farms has been linked to at least three suicides.
Online hate speech targeting trans women and trans femmes, particularly those of color, has led to real-world violence, suicide, and trauma; anti-trans narratives are also often featured in disinformation campaigns targeting services to trans communities, such as hormone access or familial support.
Anti-trans campaigns attack marginalized groups in order to isolate them, sometimes ultimately aiming to incite genocide against non-gender-conforming communities. While "transphobia" as a term implies a passive position, these online activities are often conscious and active campaigns of violence.
The recent surge in anti-trans panic across the world, on and offline, has deep roots (ranging from "Satanic panic" narratives to colonization), and the history of anti-trans rhetoric and incitement to violence on fringe online spaces is long and dark.
To raise awareness of this issue and to protect marginalized communities, the fringe platforms we analyze in this report are merely recent sites of operations for the most extreme anti-trans narratives. The do, however, offer a sense of the broader harassment campaigns trans people face on and offline.
Methodology
As the data on this topic is immense, we narrowed it down in several ways. First, we focused exclusively on comments surrounding discourse around trans people on platforms most known for cultivating anti-trans sentiment. With that filter, we searched across Open Measures’ datasets and identified relevant content on many different platforms:
2 million posts on 4chan
500,000 posts on Gab
400,000 posts on Kiwi Farms
300,000 posts on the Scored/.win network of sites
130,000 posts on Gettr
130,000 posts on Parler
125,000 posts on Telegram
Diving into this data, we identified more details and recurring themes:
On 4chan, the comments are mostly in the /pol/ board, known for hosting fascist and white nationalist content and for its alleged connections to incidents of real world violence. Over 25,000 of these isolated posts on 4chan contained the phrase “kys” (meaning “kill yourself”)
On Kiwi Farms, hateful content is mostly found in sub-forums designed to mobilize stochastic and swarm-based harassment campaigns. These campaigns seem to have the ultimate goal of inciting suicide among autistic trans women, with terms used such as “animal control.”
On Telegram, some of the top channels leaving hateful content and commentary include organizations identified above:
Kiwi Farms (involved in a seeming disinformation operation attempting to frame trans people as “groomers”)
The Goyim Defense League, a neo-Nazi group (which Open Measures has researched previously)
The alt-right 4chan /pol/
Quite a few QAnon channels
The Daily Caller, a conservative outlet previously linked to white supremacists. Among the top users were alt-right euphemisms and dogwhistles such as “1488”
Breitbart, a Steve Bannon-backed alt-right media organization
Gab's content is punctuated by Western chauvinists, alt-right groups, QAnon affiliates, and British ultra-nationalists. Among those most frequently mentioning trans-related terms alongside the word “suicide” was a Daily Stormer-affiliated site run by conspiracy theorist Andrew Anglin. The site calls for a second genocide of Jews and “degenerates”
On Parler, many anti-trans accounts were ultra-conservatives, QAnon affiliates, Trump supporters, and far-right outlet Epoch Times.
On the Scored (formerly .win) network, sentiments were driven by the forum "thedonald", known for its alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 coup attempt in the US as well as its affiliations with QAnon conspiracy groups.
Conclusion
Across all of the platforms studied, there has been a remarkable increase in gross numbers of trans-antagonistic content since 2016 (as an important note, the use of many of these platforms has also risen in general around the same time). There are peaks punctuating each major news cycle targeting trans people which show that anti-trans panic content is erratically but steadily rising (and real-world violence along with it).
These activities have gone unchecked for years under the guise of their home platforms’ stance on free speech and hands-off moderation. Through further research, Open Measures hopes to shed light on these overlooked corners of the internet in the interest of public safety and to protect marginalized communities. We encourage other researchers to use our tools to help in these efforts. For more information, please get in touch with us at info@openmeasures.io.
Identify online harms with the Open Measures platform.