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Facebook Begins Removing False HIV-Related Ads After More Than 50 LGBTQ Groups Complain

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The misleading ads Facebook removed overstated the risks and underrated the benefits of using PrEP as an HIV preventative. But LGBTQ advocates still want the social media mega-corporation to take more action.

Facebook has started pulling ads with misinformation regarding PrEP and Truvada after more than 50 LGBTQ organizations signed an open letter addressed to Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

On December 9, HIV/AIDS and public health organizations called on Facebook to remove dangerous and misleading ads. As of Dec. 30, nearly 70 organizations are listed as signatories. The newest organizations to participate include AIDS Alabama, Fenway Health, Housing Works, New York City AIDS Memorial, and U.S. People Living with HIV Caucus. A full list is here.

Independent fact-checking agency Science Feedback confirmed that an ad featuring misinformation about PrEP was found to be “misleading” and would be removed from Facebook.

According to the website of Health Feedback, a Science Feedback subsidiary, “Although the claim that the HIV drug Truvada can cause kidney damage and decrease bone density is accurate, and these side effects are stated in the drug’s prescribing instructions, the claim overstates the risks for those who take Truvada as a preventative rather than as a treatment. It also ignores the fact that the health benefits of taking Truvada for both HIV prevention and treatment may greatly outweigh the additional risks.”

The Washington Post broke the news of Facebook’s action this morning.

“After a review, our independent fact-checking partners have determined some of the ads in question mislead people about the effects of Truvada,” Facebook spokeswoman Devon Kearns said, referring to the name of the drug. “As a result we have rejected these ads and they can no longer run on Facebook.”

“It’s gratifying to see one of Facebook’s fact-checkers backing up the overwhelming consensus of AIDS, LGBTQ, and HIV medical groups that these ads are misleading. But the question remains – why is Facebook taking money from these ambulance-chasing law firms for ads that are helping the spread of HIV?” said Peter Staley, a co-founder of the PrEP4All Collaboration.

“But Facebook has put a warning on only one ad thus far, with many more unaffected,” he continued, adding: “If this is their official response, after ignoring us for months, then it’s a mess.”

“Removing select ads is a strong first step, but the time is now for Facebook to take action on other very similar ads which target at-risk community members with misleading and inaccurate claims about PrEP and HIV prevention,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD President and CEO.

Adding, “Dozens of organizations have told Facebook that the safety and effectiveness of PrEP to prevent HIV transmission is unequivocal. The pervasiveness of these ads and the subsequent real world harm should be catalysts for Facebook to further review how misleading and inaccurate ads are allowed to be targeted at LGBTQ and other marginalized communities.”

The CDC states that “studies have shown that PrEP reduces the risk of getting HIV from sex by about 99% when taken daily.” However, public health officials cite the Facebook and Instagram ads with creating dangerous barriers to PrEP usage.

Earlier this month, Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted support of the campaign to get Facebook to remove the ads and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo also issued a statement of support. On December 20, Sen. Bob Menendez, a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee that sets national health policy, also sent a letter to Zuckerberg calling the decision to allow the misleading ads to run “particularly egregious.”

The letter can be found here and excerpted below.

“Using Facebook’s and Instagram’s targeted advertising programs, various law firms are attempting to recruit gay and bisexual men who use Truvada PrEP as an HIV preventative to join a lawsuit, claiming that the drug has caused harmful side effects in this patient population, specifically bone density and kidney issues. By focusing on “Truvada” and PrEP — rather than “Tenofovir Disoproxil Fumarate” (or TDF) and HIV positive individuals who use it as an antiviral — the law firms’ advertisements are scaring away at-risk HIV negative people from the leading drug that blocks HIV infections. This is despite numerous studies underscoring the safety of TDF in HIV-negative PrEP users.

Leading public health officials, medical professionals, and dedicated PrEP navigators and outreach coordinators have shared that these advertisements on Facebook and Instagram are being directly cited by at-risk community members expressing heightened fears about taking PrEP. This issue goes beyond misinformation, as it puts real people’s lives in imminent danger.”

Three medical and HIV prevention experts recently wrote an op-ed calling out the ads, noting: “As public-health leaders, we are concerned that these often misleading and inflammatory advertisements are causing people to decide not to start PrEP or, in some cases, stop PrEP altogether. PrEP is a critically important component of the national plan to end the HIV epidemic in the United States by 2030.”

Written by Sarah Toce, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image: Mark Zuckerberg, via NCRM

IMDb Will Allow Trans Actors To Remove Deadnames From Their Database

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The Internet Movie Database has been fighting with LGBTQ advocacy groups over the issue of trans actors’ birth names for quite a while. Now, thankfully, they are backing down.

Ask any transgender person and they will tell you: getting away from your birth name is hard. Hell, ask me — I’ve certainly had my fair share of troubles with it. My bank let me change my name, but Paypal refused. The magazines I subscribe to have my correct name, but Amazon doesn’t. And when I get spam texts from political campaigns on my phone, as I do multiple times per day (I’ve definitely had occasion to regret volunteering for the Obama campaign in 2008), they always, without fail, use a name I’m very uncomfortable with being called.

This kind of thing is even more of an issue when you’re in the public eye. Transgender actors are in a particularly good position to know this, and that’s been a big reason for the push by GLAAD and other LGBTQ advocacy groups against IMDb’s policy of publishing trans actors’ birth names, also known as their deadnames, as part of their database, without the consent of the actors involved.

Thankfully, IMDb has finally seen the light. According to a statement made to Variety by the online database, which (like many things) is owned by Amazon: “IMDb now permits the removal of birth names if the birth name is not broadly publicly known and the person no longer voluntarily uses their birth name.”

The site still requires that actors or their representatives request edits to their page and go through an approval process, but this is at least a step in the right direction, and helps bring the site closer to the standard set by websites like Wikipedia and Biography.com, which do not publish transgender people’s deadnames without consent.

Multiple high-profile transgender actors are affected by this policy, including Orange Is The New Black star Laverne Cox, who has called deadnaming “the ultimate insult.”

Laverne Cox; photo by Sachyn Mital, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia

“If that were to happen to me, obviously I’d be horrified,” trans actor Jake Graf told IndieWire back in April. Graf, who transitioned before beginning his film career, called the previous IMDb policy on birth names “an infringement of privacy,” and said, “It seems like you’re outing someone. On so many levels, it seems wrong.”

Unfortunately, actors who’ve been credited under their deadnames at some point in the past will still be unable to get that name removed from their IMDb profiles. Those actors’ deadnames will appear in parentheses next to their current names. “This is in order to continue providing IMDb’s hundreds of millions of customers worldwide with comprehensive information about film and TV credits, thereby preserving the factual historical record by accurately reflecting what is listed on-screen,” IMDb’s representative told Variety.

While this policy is somewhat understandable, it remains less than ideal. “To reveal a transgender person’s birth name without their explicit permission is an invasion of privacy that only serves to undermine the trans person’s true authentic identity, and can put them at risk for discrimination, even violence,” GLAAD director of trans representation Nick Adams told the New York Times in June.

There is still plenty of progress to be made on this issue. However, for many trans actors, there will soon be one less place that calls them a name they never want to be called. And that at least is a small victory.

New GLAAD Study Shows Decline in LGBTQ Acceptance In 18-34 Year Olds

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Days before the nation’s 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and the start of WorldPride in New York, a new study is measuring American attitudes toward LGBTQ people – and the results aren’t stellar.

On Monday, GLAAD, the world’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer media advocacy organization, announced the findings of its fifth annual Accelerating Acceptance Index. The national survey among U.S. adults was conducted on GLAAD’s behalf by The Harris Poll. The Index measures American attitudes toward LGBTQ people.

The percentage of non-LGBTQ adults reporting being “very” or “somewhat” comfortable with LGBTQ people across seven scenarios remained stable (49%) after a significant decline last year (49% “very” or “somewhat” comfortable in the 2018 report versus 53% in the 2017 report).

Importantly, however, this year’s Index found the number of young Americans ages 18-34 who are comfortable across all seven scenarios dropped from 53% to 45%, the second consecutive year that this age group has shown a drop.

The Index also comes amidst a number of high profile incidents of anti-LGBTQ violence, which GLAAD has documented here. Reported hate crimes in America rose 17%, the third consecutive year that such crimes increased, according to data released by the FBI in 2018.

The Accelerating Acceptance Index was conducted online earlier this year among a national sample of 1,970 US adults, 18 or over, who were presented with seven situations that were selected by GLAAD and The Williams Institute in 2015. They include: learning a family member is LGBTQ, learning my doctor is LGBTQ, having LGBTQ members at my place of worship, seeing a LGBTQ co-worker’s wedding picture, having my child placed in a class with a LGBTQ teacher, seeing a same-sex couple holding hands, and learning my child has a lesson on LGBTQ history in school.

By combining responses to these situations, the annual Index provides insight into the rate at which non-LGBTQ Americans accept LGBTQ people.

How Comfortable are Americans with LGBTQ People?

  • This year, nearly half of non-LGBTQ adults (49%) are classified as ‘allies’ in the Index, meaning they responded that they were ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ comfortable with LGBTQ people across all of the seven situations. This is has not changed from the 49% reported in 2018, which was down from 53% the year prior.
  • 38% of non-LGBTQ adults are classified as ‘detached supporters’, whose comfort levels varies across the seven scenarios. 13% are classified as ‘resisters’ and are not comfortable in any of the situations that were presented. The percentage of ‘resisters’ has been stable since the start of the Accelerating Acceptance Index.
  • The only age group to post a decline this year was young Americans ages 18-34. The number of non-LGBTQ U.S. adults ages 18-34 who reported being ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ comfortable across all seven situations dropped from 53% to 45%. This reflects a continued erosion in comfort among this age group over the past two years.  This year, the significant erosion is being driven by females ages 18-34, where comfort levels fell from 64% last year to 52% this year.
  • In total, 18% of respondents report knowing a transgender person; 31% know a bisexual person; 75% know a gay or lesbian person.

Young People are More Uncomfortable with LGBTQ People in Personal Situations:

  • More young people ages 18-34 responded that they were ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ uncomfortable in three personal scenarios including learning a family member is LGBTQ (36% uncomfortable in the 2019 report vs. 29% in the 2018 report); learning my doctor is LGBTQ (34% vs. 27%); and learning my child had a lesson on LGBTQ history in their school (39% vs. 30%).
  • 43% of males ages 18-34 reported that they were uncomfortable learning a family member is LGBTQ (up from 32% in 2018) and 42% of males ages 18-34 reported that they were uncomfortable learning their child’s teacher is LGBTQ (up from 37% in 2018).
  • 40% of females ages 18-34 reported that they were uncomfortable learning their child had a lesson on LGBTQ history in school, an increase of 13 percentage points from the previous year’s findings.

8 out of 10 Americans Support Equal Rights for LGBTQ People for Third Consecutive Year:

  • GLAAD and The Harris Poll found that support for equal rights is stable. The majority of non-LGBTQ Americans (80%) support equal rights for the LGBTQ community. This particular statistic has been consistent since 2016.
  • 12% of the survey reported to be LGBTQ. In order to be more inclusive than other surveys, GLAAD includes a more expansive number of sexual orientations and gender identities to select from.

“Last year, when we saw an erosion in LGBTQ acceptance, GLAAD doubled down on our formula for making positive culture change,” said GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis. “The sharp and quick rise in divisive rhetoric both in politics and in culture is now having a negative influence on younger Americans and coinciding with an alarming pattern of anti-LGBTQ violence and discrimination. As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, LGBTQ people and allies must urgently address today’s cultural crisis by being visible and vigilant.”

“We typically see in our surveys that younger Americans can be counted on to advocate for issues like gender equality, immigration, and climate change,” said John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll. “So it is surprising to see a notable erosion of acceptance for the LTBTQ community, which counters many of the assumptions we make about their values and beliefs. In this toxic age, tolerance––even among youth––now seems to be parsed out. Nothing today should be taken for granted.”

Read the full report and learn more about the data collection methods here: glaad.org/acceptance.

Written by Sarah Toce, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image via NCRM