Policy shifts among the tech giants and the effect on the LGBTQIA+ community

Tech headlines have been dominated the past week by the influence of the incoming Trump administration on changing policies of the big tech, especially the social media giants.

Notably, Meta have removed their fact-checking unit (replacing it with a Community Notes program similar to X.com) and updated their terms and conditions to enable users to “make allegations of mental illness when based on gender or sexual orientation”. They’ve also made clear they intend to wind back internal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives affecting their hiring, training, and selection of suppliers.

Meta has never had a particularly friendly relationship with left-of-centre governments: Labor will impose a ban on under-16s using social media and sought to “put legal obligations on social media platforms to limit false, misleading and deceptive content, or content likely to cause serious harm” (similar laws exist in the EU & UK, but legislation was abandoned here). Meta withdrew from an agreement with news organisations to pay for news headlines appearing on its platform, with the government planning to legislate to force tech firms to pay for news content as a result.

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has sought to repair its relationship with incoming president and Republican administration, after a fraught relationship with the outgoing Biden administration, donating $US1m to his inauguration fund and adding Tump-ally Dana White to its board. It had previously suspended Trump’s social media accounts after Trump supporters invaded the Capitol.

Meanwhile, X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk looks very likely to be a powerful member of the incoming administration, tasked with cutting a substantial amount of US government spending. Since purchasing Twitter and renaming it, Musk has used his control of the platform to amplify hateful content about LGBT people, spread misleading information about the US elections or enable users to misgender people.

X maintains a policy of restricting or excluding posts that contain hateful references and imagery, incitement, slurs, and dehumanizing content against individuals and protected groups, but it remains questionable how effective this is in practice: GLAAD’s Social Media Safety Index gave most major platforms a failing score for keeping LGBT+ members safe in 2024, with X/Twitter the worst.

How could this affect Australia?

In the Workplace

In terms of DEI initiatives, the Tech Council in Australia has come out and said it won’t follow Meta’s lead (notably, Meta and X are not members even though other US tech giants LinkedIn and Google are listed as members). More broadly, Meta’s shift has opened the debate in Australia around diversity and inclusion initiatives, with major engineering employer Rio Tinto’s CEO pointing to a backlash.

Australia has protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status (with notable exemptions for religious groups). However, the laws against vilification and hateful speech are more patchwork.

Online

eSafety’s research shows that LGBTIQ+ Australians experience online hate at twice the national average, and LGBT groups operating online work hard to remove hateful and abusive comments.

It’s long been a federal criminal offence to use a carriage service to menace, harass or offend, and in NSW, to vilify publicly on the basis they are homosexual (but which by definition is limited in the scope of LGBTQIA+ people it applies to). NSW recently passed legislation that added aggravated sentencing for crimes motivated by hate based on gender identity or intersex status and threatening to out a LGBTQIA+ person, but similarly, provisions remain for religious groups. Other states have a patchwork of hate-crime laws covering sexual orientation or gender identity or neither.

In practice, the law is only as good as its enforcement. Finding, let alone prosecuting, abusive and hateful anti-LGBTQIA+ content online is difficult and law enforcement will usually focus their efforts on the most likely efforts to get a prosecution.

As LGBTQIA+ people, we also fight censorship of our own efforts to organise and form communities in social media spaces. In Australia, LGBTQIA+ groups continue to fight arbitrary shut-downs and removals of their groups and their pages on social media.

Loosening rules around moderation of content on social media platforms is good for business: content moderation is expensive and time-consuming, and inflammatory content is good for engagement (of key importance to advertisers who provide most of the revenue for social media platforms). It’s also good politically: the incoming Trump administration and its supporters have long been targets of censorship on social media of their often misleading and inflammatory posts.

Conduct of individuals online is also a reflection of community attitudes around acceptable speech, and those boundaries are often set around what people see their political and business leaders as tolerating or encouraging. Views expressed online are often more extreme than what someone would express in person thanks to the pseudo-anonymity of the internet.

What does this mean in Australia

We don’t anticipate this situation improving with an incoming political administration in the US that is more closely aligned with anti-LGBT groups, and social media CEOs wanting to maintain a favourable relationship by giving more space on their platform to their often misleading and inflammatory posts.

The US political situation is important in Australia because it influences our politics, and more practically, all the major social media platforms in Australia are US-based and take their cues from US. Although we don't expect shifts from LinkedIn and Youtube, both Meta and X have demonstrated their unwillingness to improve their content moderation both here and in the EU.

It's unclear what impact this will have on Tiktok's policies: Trump has opposed the Biden administration's ban in the US, but they could be a bargaining chip in Trump's intended trade war with China or to pacify his supporters, possibly being pressured to bargain away their thriving LGBT community in order to satisfy demands. Chinese officials are mulling over whether they should split off its US operations and sell it to Trump.

The situation in Australia is more ambiguous but not promising: the government abandoned proposed legislation that would limit misinformation online and remove religious discrimination in schools, and the opposition has made it clear it wants to revive the culture war against what it sees as a “woke agenda”, with the Opposition Leader’s past decisions and declarations indicating his willingness to use LGBTQIA+ issues to drive it.