This paper examines crackdowns on queer content on TikTok and creative responses of content creators to circumvent biased content moderation and cisheteronormative censorship. The first portion of the paper demonstrates TikTok’s recurrent cisheteronormative biases in content moderation decisions and examines select instances of LGBTQ+ content that has been censored on the platform. It also works to situate this within a broader trend of LGBTQ+ censorship across internet platforms. The second portion of the paper examines how LGBTQ+ TikTok users have built up folk knowledges and intuitive understandings of TikTok’s blackboxed algorithms and opaque content moderation policies, situating this discussion within theories of the ‘algorithmic imaginary’. It catalogs the myriad ways that TikTok users work to circumvent LGBTQ+ censorship on the platform (e.g. by tactically obscuring key words in both speech and text and obscuring body parts and scenes). In the final portion of the paper, I draw on the concept of ‘cruising’ and other constitutive silences of LGBTQ+ existence to show how LGBTQ+ users are particularly well suited to producing folk knowledge about blackboxed algorithms. In closing, I examine the affordances and the limitations of LGBTQ+ users’ approach to navigating platform governance – and content moderation practices more specifically – as well as call for more organized and collective action in search of more permanent changes towards LGBTQ+-friendly platforms.

Before the millennium, finding other queer people often involved travelling to a queer venue in a city. Consequently, queer people have been at the forefront of internet technologies such as hook-up apps, namely Grindr. Rural hook-up app use is under-researched, and queer visibility may be more carefully negotiated in rural areas than in cities.

We carried out a qualitative study to establish whether location and/or technology use shaped social, sexual and romantic network creation and/or quality. Thirty-eight participants in cities and rural areas across the UK took part.

We found hook-up apps to be the only source of local queer connection for some rural participants. Users speak of being drawn to these technologies when lonely, yet find they can contribute to feelings of isolation. Being visible, which the pictorial logic of some hook-up apps demands, can be difficult in rurality due to partial ‘outness’ about sexuality. Some fear meeting other app users in public in rural areas due to potential homophobia, yet lack access to private spaces. Some users find innovative ways to meet goals of friendship and community beyond the perceived affordances of sexual hook-ups, such as forming friendship and community groups via or beyond apps.

This demonstrates that hook-up apps are inadequately-tailored tools for participants’ queerness, which extends beyond visible sexuality to negotiated communities and relationships of trust. This contributes to wider understanding of technology’s role in shaping social cohesion across diverse geographies and groups and the demands of visibility of such technologies on users.

Transgender people face substantial challenges in the world, such as discrimination, harassment, and lack of access to basic resources. Some of these challenges could be addressed to some extent with technology. In this paper I examine the world of trans technology design through interviews with 115 creators of trans technologies: apps, games, health resources, and other types of technology. I demonstrate that trans technology design processes are often deeply personal, and focus on the technology creator’s needs and desires. Thus, trans technology design can be empowering because technology creators have agency to create tools they need to navigate the world. However, in some cases when trans communities are not involved in design processes, this can lead to overly individualistic design that speaks primarily to more privileged trans people’s needs.

This paper presents the results of an exploratory study that examines the social implications that platform algorithms raise for LGBTQ+ communities. We share the preliminary results of our Phase 2 group interviews, which were conducted with Canadian social media managers of LGBTQ+ non-profit organizations and with Canada-based LGBTQ+ tech workers. Algorithmic controversies relating to LGBTQ+ communities identified in Phase 1 were used as prompts to elicit discussions among participants. In this paper, we pay close attention to how participants queered dominant algorithmic imaginaries. Our preliminary analysis highlights four main findings. First, participants questioned dominant discourses that depict AI technology as being inherently new, instead re-inscribing algorithmic controversies within a long-lasting history of gender and sexual oppression. Second, participants reconfigured the ideal-type user embedded in sociotechnical systems but also identified challenges with effecting sociotechnical change as LGBTQ+ stakeholders. Third, participants subverted the notion of algorithmic resistance by questioning whether effective technological resistance should rely on technological misuse or disuse. Fourth, participants translated algorithmic controversies via their positionality as LGBTQ+ stakeholders to move beyond purely technicist considerations. Finally, we highlight the importance of mobilizing stakeholders from marginalized communities to contest the dominant discourses through which society makes sense of AI technologies.