Digital sexual citizenship and LGBT young people's platform use

Abstract

Drawing on original interviews and digital ethnography conducted with 20 LGBT young people, and using critical platform studies and a design-centric approach, this paper demonstrates how platform use has enabled LGBT young people maintain sexual identity authenticity, normalise fluidity, reimagine community through allied algorithmic mediation, negotiate the threat of peer surveillance, and refuse platform norms so as to self-narrate gender affirmation, organise collective resources and repudiate the performance of online inauthenticity. This paper considers these practices as emergent acts of digital sexual citizenship that are becoming prevalent in countries with no sexual rights and argues that platform affordances furnish the infrastructure for LGBT young people to evade the state surveillance of homosexuality and find allied friendships, romantic partners and safe communities.

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“…Gillespie (2017, p. 66) has recorded an interesting story that, due to US Senator Rick Santorum’s radical attitude to opposing LGBT+ rights, the word “santorum” was redefined by LGBT+ people as “the frothy mixture of fecal matter and lube that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex”; and the websites of Spreadingsantorum.com and Santorum.com, which spread this new definition, have been unexpectedly recognized by the Google algorithm and remained at the top of the search results for nearly a decade. In this matter, an algorithm became LGBT+ people’s “ally,” as suggested by Yue and Lim (2022, p. 339), when their interviewers reported that platform algorithms can be positive in visualizing LGBT+ content. Simpson and Semaan (2021, p. 24) also resonate with the above perception, as they found that recommendation algorithms on TikTok can help LGBT+ people reach out to communities and reaffirm their sexual identity; but meanwhile, they seriously accuse the TikTok algorithms of having implementing the structural exclusion of LGBT+ people in a “bounded sociotechnical system” and even in a broad “societal structure.” Karizat et al (2021) conceptualize such algorithmic marginalization as “algorithmic representational harm,” noting that TikTok algorithms have been being used to erase vulnerable people’s practice traces and restrain their narratives.…”