Australian LGBTIQ+ politicians were hit with vile online abuse at the last federal election. The coming campaign could be even worse

Newly published research has found clear evidence that openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, and queer+ (LGBTIQ+) Australian politicians were disproportionately targeted with personal abuse on social media at the last federal election. Given global trends, it’s unlikely to be any different this year.

Simply logging off is not an option for candidates, who need to communicate with voters. As a result, some politicians will continue to face risky online visibility.

Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter/X, hate speech has surged, particularly for public figures such as parliamentarians.

So what do these trends mean for queer candidates ahead of this year’s election? And why does it matter for the next generation of politically engaged young people?

Queer politicians targeted

We analysed more than 100,000 tweets across the Twitter profiles of eight openly queer politicians and candidates (Penny Wong, Julian Hill, Nita Green, Tim Wilson, Janet Rice, Rachael Jacobs, Claire Garton, Stephen Bates) during the 2022 federal election campaign. We compared them with eight other politicians (Zoe Daniel, Graham Perrett, Lidia Thorpe, Anthony Chisholm, Barbara Pocock, Simon Birmingham, Deborah O'Neill, David Shoebridge) in the same period.

We suspected that political hopefuls who publicly identified as LGBTIQ+ may have experienced greater levels of abuse and harassment. But what we found surprised us.

The level of online intimidation was roughly the same for queer and non-queer politicians. However, the type of abuse differed significantly.

Queer politicians endured highly personal harassment that specifically targeted their gender or physical appearance. They suffered nasty queer-specific slurs, transphobic messages and ableist language. Essentially, nothing that was related to their policies or politics.

Meanwhile, straight, cisgender politicians received harassment that was typically political in nature. More of it focused on their party or platform. It wasn’t as personal (with the exception of Thorpe, who received high levels of racist abuse). While overtly hostile, for straight politicians in general much of the harassment received might be considered an unavoidable part of the democratic political process in the social media age.

Our research provides a useful retrospective of some of the vitriol that proliferated during the last election.

One such event began with YouTube commentator Jordan Shanks breaking a salacious story of repeated sexual misconduct by staffers in Canberra, purportedly in MPs offices and in the parliamentary multi-faith prayer room.

Our data tracked the way queer male politicians were wrongly affiliated and tagged in the scandal. They were unfairly accused and ridiculed. The unfounded attacks were non-partisan, involving politicians from across the major parties. This indicated a single point of commonality – their sexuality.

Liberal MP Tim Wilson, who had no involvement in the scandal, received over 2000 tweets explicitly mentioning the incident. Many were overtly homophobic, using terms such as “toy boy”, “rentboy”, “parasite” and “prayer room pervert”.