News

Children’s hospitals targeted by anti-LGBTQ activists online : NPR


Children’s Hospital Boston said it received “threats of violence against our doctors and staff” after falsely claiming online that the hospital offers genital surgery to minors.

Lane Turner / The Boston Globe via Getty Images


hide captions

switch captions

Lane Turner / The Boston Globe via Getty Images


Children’s Hospital Boston said it received “threats of violence against our doctors and staff” after falsely claiming online that the hospital offers genital surgery to minors.

Lane Turner / The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Hospitals and doctors across the country are facing harassment and even death threats over the medical care they provide to transgender children. In many cases, they have been the subject of posts by a Twitter account called Libs of TikTok, as well as stories in conservative media that view gender-based care as child abuse and mutilation. em.

This begs the question: where should social networks attract the attention of accounts promoting stories that fuel harassment campaigns on their platforms and beyond?

The National Children’s Hospital in Washington, DC became the most recent target this week when TikTok’s Libs posted an audio recording in which hospital staff appeared to say that a sex-affirming hysterectomy had been performed. performed on minors. The hospital said that claim was incorrect and that no person was recorded as caring for the patient.

“The information in the recording is inaccurate. We do not and have never performed a sex-affirming hysterectomy on anyone under the age of 18,” Children National said in a statement to NPR. “The moderator said he gave false information.”

The statement continued: “Since spreading misinformation on Twitter, we have been the target of a large number of hateful and threatening phone calls and emails.”

Children’s hospitals in Boston, Seattle, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon, have also been targeted. Last week, Boston Children’s Hospital warned that it had received “a large amount of hostile internet activity, harassing phone calls and emails, including threats of violence against our doctors and staff” after False statement it performs genital surgery on minors.

The US Department of Justice even weighed in, with US Attorney for Massachusetts calling the attacks “disturbing.”

False statement, out of context video

Angela Kade Goepferd, a pediatrician and director of the Gender Health Program at Children’s Minnesota, says these false stories about gender-affirming care for children stem from “misperceptions” wrong”.

“People have a misconception that we are operating on very young children. People misperceive that we are changing children from boys to girls at a very young age,” they said.

They said care for transgender children varied, from efforts to help children transition socially to drugs that prevent puberty, and was done with the involvement of psychologists. paediatricians, clinical social workers, hormone specialists and endocrinologists, and families. They said sex determination surgery is not a routine part of sex care for children and Children Minnesota does not perform any such surgery.

The Libs of TikTok account, the Libs of TikTok account, regularly reposts videos and social media posts by LGBTQ people, teachers, schools, and other organizations that have made several statements about the claims. about Children National, Boston Children and other hospitals. These clips are sometimes taken out of context and framed to incite outrage or ridicule LGBTQ and anti-racist causes, in what the account owner has described as “show off”. of “crazy people”.

For example, a short clip of uterine sex determination from a video originally posted by Boston Children that Libs of TikTok reposted does not mention the patient’s age. But TikTok’s Libs tweeted along with the clip falsely claiming that the hospital provides surgery “for young girls.”

TikTok’s Libs, run by a Brooklyn woman named Chaya Raichik, has 1.3 million followers on its largest platform, Twitter. It has gained prominence and influence among the right in the last year as conservatives increasingly try to use it. anti-LGBTQ sentiment for assistance.

NPR has reached out to Raichik about this story. She initially responded and agreed to an interview, but did not respond to subsequent messages. Raichik frequently denounces criticism of her online activities as her attempt to “cancel and silence”. She has said that she has also been targeted with death threats.

Platform to fight harassment networks

Twitter and Facebook prohibit bullying and harassment, coordinating mass attacks, and inciting violence. Both companies forbid the use of the word “grooming” to smear LGBTQ people under their rules against hate speech.

The platforms have removed some of the threats against hospitals. But it’s not yet clear how much liability companies can or will impose on accounts that draw attention to targets that end up being harassed.

Twitter previously temporarily suspended TikTok’s Libs for violating its rules. The company declined to comment on this account. Following the reported threats from Boston Children’s Hospital, TikTok’s Libs said it had been permanently suspended by Facebook for violating the platform’s community standards. But that was quickly reversed, the account went back to posting on Facebook, claiming that the social network thought it was a mistake. Facebook declined to comment on the suspension.

TikTok’s libs appear to have avoided bans altogether by following the platform’s rules but not violating them. The account explicitly discourages followers from threatening anyone and often uses the target’s own words, sometimes without context, to imply wrongdoing.

But while its individual posts may stick to the lettering of the platform’s rules, their cumulative impact is what has led researchers like Joan Donovan, who studies online extremism. , media manipulation and disinformation at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy concerns.

“We’ve reached this stage on social media where people know what to do when an account like TikTok’s Libs calls out to another account or an individual or organization,” she said. The appeals can spark harassment campaigns known as “brigading”, where commenters focus on a common goal.

In the case of children’s hospitals, “threats have moved from insulting people or targeted accounts online to more direct threats,” Donovan said. “Online threats escalate very quickly into offline violence as we start to see these types of attacks.”

For social networks to deal with what Donovan calls “cyber agitation,” she says that effectively tracking such threats means looking beyond single posts across platforms. specific platform.

“The flood of comments may not be that provocative, but if that creates a recognizable type of attack, which is with an account like TikTok’s Libs, then these companies have enough. ability to warn and then ban the account.”

Right-wing groups targeting LGBTQ, education and healthcare events

Pediatricians and children’s hospitals are just the latest targets of right-wing outrage, in a new edition of the decades old stains of gays, lesbians, and transgenders as pedophiles or “snobs”.

“The Libs of TikTok account has been a major contributor to a lot of the harassment campaigns we’ve seen over the past year,” said Ari Drennen, LGBTQ program director at Media Matters for America, a freedom advocacy group.

In some cases, facts and figures made public by Libs of TikTok have been targeted offline by far-right extremists known for brawls.

For example, on a single day this summer, men with ties to the white nationalist group Patriotic Front was arrested outside a Proud event of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, and alleged members of the far-right Proud Boys dropped an hour of storytelling about drag queens at a library in San Lorenzo, California. TikTok’s Libs tweeted about both events, although there was no convincing link between the posts and the extremist groups’ activity.

Like Washington Post report in April, the account’s topics and posts are regularly featured and promoted by other conservative influencers and media personalities, including podcaster Joe Rogan. Raichik appeared on Tucker Carlson’s primetime Fox News program.

The growing stigma against transgender medical care worries doctors.

“It is a developmentally appropriate, team-based approach that allows children time to figure out their identity,” said Dr. Goepferd of Children Minnesota.

Threats to hospitals emerge, affecting not only hospital staff, but also patients and families seeking all forms of care, as well as the necessary long-term studies in this field. “I worry that this type of misreporting will make research institutions or funders nervous when funding additional studies to find out what is the best possible care we can get,” says Goepferd. available now”.

“The fact that somewhere the message has spread that it’s okay to attack doctors, pediatricians, children’s hospitals in this way is just a really disturbing social trend,” they said. speak.

Editor’s Note: The parent meta of Facebook pays NPR to license NPR content.



Source link

news7f

News7F: Update the world's latest breaking news online of the day, breaking news, politics, society today, international mainstream news .Updated news 24/7: Entertainment, Sports...at the World everyday world. Hot news, images, video clips that are updated quickly and reliably

Related Articles

Back to top button