Building Healthy Online Communities, or BHOC, has begun an effort to boost niceness on apps designed for men who have sex with men.
“People in the LGBTQ community face discrimination externally, but we also have to acknowledge that there is discrimination within the community,” said BHOC director Jen Hecht.
Through surveys and focus groups, BHOC asked more than 5,000 users of nine gay apps how the sites could support better online behavior related to race, appearance, HIV status, age, disability, gender identity and other factors. It also sought advice on technical improvements the apps could make, such as offering users greater flexibility in conducting searches for contacts.
“If I can filter out people who wrote ‘no fats, no fems, no black people,’ I don’t even have to deal with seeing it,” wrote one respondent quoted in BHOC’s report on the data gathered from app users. Representatives for some of the participating apps said they welcomed the collaboration. “We’ve had a non-bullying policy since day one,” said David Lesage, marketing and social media director for Adam4Adam.
Mean online behavior is, of course, not limited to apps for men. When asked last month by email whether meeting sites that cater to the general population should also be trying to address the issue, Evan Bonnstetter, Tinder’s director of product policy, responded that the company was “unable to participate in this opportunity.” (Bonnstetter has since left Tinder.) Bumble, another site popular with heterosexuals, did not respond to a request for comment.
Gay and bisexual men, like other groups that face discrimination, have higher rates of depression, substance misuse and related mental health concerns. But John Pachankis, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health who studies gay men’s health, said his research has identified aggressiveness within the gay community as a major problem.
“I was initially quite surprised that gay men were consistently noting their treatment at the hands of other gay men as being a predominant stressor,” Pachankis said. Apps, he added, “are a site of a lot of potential rejection in a short amount of time in a way that is particularly anonymous and efficient and can be really detrimental.”
In one study, Pachankis and his colleagues simulated a gay app environment in which some research participants were exposed to dismissive comments and others to approving comments. (The comments were all computer-generated.)
In subsequent responses on questionnaires, the men exposed to the dismissive comments reported greater emotional distress and expressed more skepticism about the benefits of condoms. They were also more likely to choose riskier options in a card-playing game.
Given that the app environment is the source of stress, Pachankis said, it makes sense for BHOC and other public health organizations to try to influence it
Some respondents quoted in the BHOC report dismissed the initiative as silly or unwarranted. “If someone does not meet the preferences specified by the user for being ‘fat,’ ‘too old,’ or not the right ‘race,’ then too bad,” wrote one. “I find this overreach in striving to be PC as offensive and ridiculous.”
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