A Loophole in Facebook’s Ban on Conversion Therapy
Last year, we may have noticed a shift in reduced conversion therapy posts on Facebook—the practice that attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity. The platform banned English-language posts on conversion therapy last year. However, messages that promote it in Arabic continue.
Most Arabic speakers use Facebook as their main social media site. The downside to this means conversion therapy posts reach many people. It’s dangerous to the LGBTQ communities in Arabic countries because they face persecution.
“If you are a parent who only speaks Arabic you open up Facebook; you search for information, and what you’ll see is posts from people who say they are doctors, and that it’s a disease that can be cured,” Nora Noralla, an Egyptian LGBTQ researcher, tells Reuters.
Heba Kotb, an Egyptian sex therapist with more than 2 million followers on Facebook, practices conversion therapy on her some of her patients.
Kotb treated Taha Metwally, an Egyptian LGBTQ activist, several times more than a decade ago. Part of the treatment involved an anal exam, which was traumatic for Metwally, according to Reuters.
The United Nations declared that when forcibly conducted, conversion therapy amounts to torture toward patients.
Torture affects mental health, and some countries recognize this. Still, many countries and 26 states in the United States contain no policy regarding conversion therapy.
Based on a report from The Williams Institute, survivors of conversion therapy are “twice as likely to end their lives,” claims Them.
The report included that more than 700,000 LGBTQ people underwent the therapy. They experienced shame, trauma, and physical abuse. They were also told their sexual orientations and gender identities were sinful or unnatural.
Why Facebook continues to allow posts on conversion therapy is because of whack-a-mole. This means there are indirect phrases that constantly change to throw off the artificial intelligence of the platform.
LGBTQ activists from Arabic-speaking countries challenge Facebook’s allowance of these posts. However, it has been a difficult process to get Facebook to ban certain content.
Twenty-eight LGBTQ and women’s rights groups published a letter in March 2020 asking Facebook to control the messages of conversion therapists. In response, Facebook explained their policies and declined their requests to create a page countering the “myths.”
“The least Facebook could do,” Metwally says, “is to accompany content promising ‘cures’ with warning labels, as it does for inaccurate posts about COVID-19 or elections. Why can’t we have that? This is very dangerous content to us—but to Facebook, it does not seem to be a priority.”
