Trust and safety is a major concern for LGBTQ-identifying people who regularly spend time on social media platforms. There are large LGBTQ communities on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, but according to new research from The Trevor Project, one platform makes its queer users feel the safest: TikTok.
The Trevor Project conducted its survey by soliciting responses from 28,524 people. The participants, who were recruited via targeted ads, were U.S. residents between the ages of 13 and 24.
Many of those individuals have found supportive communities on TikTok. The ByteDance-owned app is particularly trusted by LGBTQ people of color. 53% of queer POC respondents told The Trevor Project that they feel safe and understood on TikTok. For queer white respondents, the corresponding figure was 46%.
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For both LGBTQ young people of color and their white counterparts, Instagram was the second-most trusted platform, and Twitter ranked third. Only one-third of queer POC respondents reported feeling safe on YouTube. While the Google-owned platform has joined its peers by supporting its queer users, its history is filled with numerous instances in which its treatment of LGBTQ content (and anti-LGBTQ content) has been questioned.
By asking a wide range of questions, The Trevor Project attempted to capture both the benefits and harms queer youths experience when they go online. “There are lots of good things and also, unfortunately, lots of harmful things,” Trevor Project Senior Machine Learning Research Scientist Wilson Lee told TechCrunch. “And then they’re also good and harmful in different ways for different people, so [we’re] trying to sort of dive into that.”
The Trevor Project didn’t just identify the platforms on which queer users feel most safe. It also used its findings to stress the importance of that security. According to the survey, LGBTQ-identifying youths who don’t feel safe or understood in any online space are slightly more likely than their peers to experience anxiety and attempt suicide.
Rather than focusing on the negative takeaways from its survey, The Trevor Project is using its results to remind tech companies that trusted online spaces can have significant positive effects on queer users. To check out all of the organization’s findings, head over to its website.
