Last year, Facebook announced that the social media company was banning content advocating for conversion therapy from its platforms. But despite these policies, LGBTQ+ advocates say posts promoting the harmful, debunked practice continue to proliferate in Arabic.
“Facebook led me to conversion therapy, and I’m not alone,” Omar, a 24-year-old Egyptian, told Reuters. “I didn’t start out looking for treatment, I wanted to understand, is it normal?”
While Facebook has taken action against English-language pages claiming to “cure” an LGBTQ+ person’s identity, a Thursday report alleges that there’s a major loophole in the company’s policy: It doesn’t appear to be enforced in Arabic. According to Reuters, conversion therapy content “still thrives” in the Middle East, and accounts in the reegion continue “promote their services freely” even after the 2020 ban.
“Not only do pre-ban posts advocating conversion therapy remain visible, but new posts continue to flood the site,” the publication reports, adding that some users spread these posts to “millions of followers through verified accounts.”
Despite Facebook reassuring that content promoting conversion therapy violates their platform’s guidelines, LGBTQ+ advocates say the posts remain up.
“From our experience, these posts are almost never taken down, no matter what the rules say,” the executive director of one Egypt-based LGBTQ+ rights group, asking to remain anonymous, told Reuters.
Awsam Wasfy, who has over 150,000 followers on a page where he advertises his abilities to “cure” homosexuality, is still active on Facebook. So is Heba Kotb, who has over 2 million followers and says she has successfully “treated” over 3,000 gay people from all over the Arab world, including by performing anal exams as part of a “sexual assessment.”
Facebook told Reuters that neither page had any “active” violations.
“It’s a game of whack-a-mole,” Mathew Shurka, an LGBTQ+ activist in the United States who has worked with Facebook on the issue of conversion therapy content, added. “They’re constantly shifting language and tactics.”
Conversion therapy has been banned in several countries, including Albania, Malta, Germany, and New Zealand, along with 20 states in the U.S. Countries like Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom are working toward outlawing the practice, which has been likened to “torture” by the United Nations. Nearly every leading U.S. medical group has come out against it.
LGBTQ+ advocates say that conversion therapy has extremely harmful effects. It can create intense shame, lower self-esteem, and even increase suicidal ideation. A 2020 report from The Williams Institute, a pro-LGBTQ+ think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), found that survivors of the practice were twice as likely to try to end their lives. A separate report from the Trevor Project in 2019 found that 42% of survivors had attempted suicide over the past year.
Content that promotes conversion therapy is especially harmful when it is accessible on social media, where vulnerable youth are more likely to stumble upon it. Facebook is the most-widely used social media platform in the Arabic-speaking world, meaning the problem has wide-reaching implications.
And it’s not just queer youth who might find pro-conversion therapy content and be influenced by it. “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, told Reuters.
While the Reuters report specifically examined content on Facebook’s platform, the company also owns Instagram, which has similar guidelines in place. TikTok, which is not owned by Facebook, also banned material promoting conversion therapy from the app last year.
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