As we think we live in a more open and tolerant world, an undercurrent of violence and hatred towards LGBTQ+ individuals is rising. And it’s not just physical as every 23 seconds, a homophobic remark is posted online. It’s so omnipresent that people ignore it. Studies show that only 9% of people report online hate when they see it, claiming the process is too long or complicated.

Social media companies aren’t doing much to prevent the proliferation of hate and the reason is simple: hate generates clicks and clicks generate ad revenue.

Knowing that we’re past the point of raising awareness, Emergence –– one of Canada’s leading LGBTQ+ rights organizations created a tool to have the people do it for them.

We had to work around the fact that flagging isn’t a habit a lot of social media users have developed and that people tend to scroll past hateful comments. To overcome these two obstacles, we turned the universal symbol of LGBTQ+ inclusion –– the Pride Flag into a digital tool that allows people to fight for social justice.

The Chrome Extension automatically strikes through homophobia using the colours of the Pride Flag, hacking Twitter’s reporting system by creating a shortcut. Making the hate easier to see and flag. The plugin uses a comprehensive database of 50 offensive terms in 15 different languages. Once Pride Flagging finds offensive terms on users’ Twitter feeds, they then have to make the call and decide whether the term deserves to be flagged.

Studies show that the LGBTQ+ community, especially millenials and Gen Z don’t feel that they need to fight for equality anymore. Most of them live in urban areas where gender diversity is accepted and celebrated. So it was imperative for us to help our target realize that online bullying can have dangerous repercussions and that despite the fact that we’re moving towards a more inclusive world, there’s still work to do. We needed to bring our target in as part of the mass-flagging effort –– helping them develop the simple habit of flagging, showing them that they have an impact to get them out of apathy. The reason we choose Twitter as our battleground: the platform is still the most lax in terms of enforcing the removal of hate speech so it’s where we could have the strongest, most direct impact.

Pride Flagging launched during Montreal’s Pride Month in mid-August and is still going strong. The smart text-finder that substitutes the usual blue text highlight to a rainbow-colored strikethrough to both mask hateful words and make them easy to spot. Once activated, each highlighted term shows a tiny Pride Flag icon that engages the user to click and flag. People could download the extension through a campaign website on which LGBTQ+ activists and publications could copy a simple line of code to add a Pride Flagging download button directly on their website. The program launched during Montreal’s Pride Month in mid-August and is still going strong.

We primarily leveraged social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram) to get downloads and used PR to get the initiative going with earned media.

Two months after the launch, Twitter reported a global increase of 8% in flagging instances for reasons disclosed as “This language is hurtful to me” which is unprecedented. To this day, 2,000+ tweets were removed by Twitter following mass reporting via Pride Flagging and 11 accounts were banned forever after users Pride Flagged a number of their offensive tweets. Considering that only 6 accounts were banned in Canada in the first half of 2019, the numbers are staggering.

The Chrome Extension was downloaded by over a thousand people and 120+ users activate the plugin on a weekly basis. Around 15+ instances of hate speech are flagged everyday by multiple users, including the Emergence Foundation who now uses it as a work tool. Emergence is working alongside QueerTech to expand the program to Facebook. Amazingly, Twitter announced it would create a policy to better enforce hate speech in early 2020.