When Elon Musk changed Twitter to X, I vowed not to honor his chosen name. Now, nearly two years later, I’ve accepted that I was in denial. Twitter is gone. All that’s left is X.

The internet is broken. This is abundantly clear to me not only as a queer person but as the editor for one of the few remaining online publications not owned by a media giant. While I finally stopped “tweeting” from my personal account last month, it hasn’t been an easy platform to abandon. The mix of bots and subscribers under almost every post say horrid things or they comment @grok?? asking Elon’s AI bot to give them misinformation in exchange for poisoning the air. Every time I’ve logged on over the past two years, it’s made me feel terrible — and not in the jokey way we used to describe. And yet, it’s still the largest social media platform to share written work. Even in its current form, it boosts traffic for this site, getting our hard work out to readers new and old. I’ve stopped posting from my personal account, but the Autostraddle account still plans to use that terrible place to share our articles. There’s nowhere else to go.

GLAAD’s 2025 Social Media Safety Index was released this morning and their findings are brutal. Using their Platform Scorecard, GLAAD’s team assessed X, Meta (Instagram, Facebook, Threads), TikTok, and YouTube. The only company to receive over 50 (out of 100) was TikTok coming in at a whopping 56. However, as GLAAD notes, “TikTok should show greater transparency around the wrongful removal and demonization of LGBTQ-related content.” Is it the safest social media platform because it cares about queer people? Or is it the safest social media platform because it attempts to remove queer people altogether? How does it affect queer people if the only platform not full of hate speech encourages them to write things like le$bean to avoid shadowbans and forces sex workers to call it corn?

And yet, it’s understandable why the puritanical TikTok might be more appealing than Meta and YouTube after both companies’ recent policy changes. Facebook and Instagram received scores of 45 with Threads receiving a 40, stating that the company “revised its ‘Hateful Conduct’ policy this year to expressly allow and encourage hate, harassment, and discrimination against LGBTQ people.” YouTube, with a score of 41, made a similar change removing “gender identity and expression” from its list of protected characteristic groups. GLAAD notes, “The company has claimed that the policy has not changed, however it is an objective fact that the gender identity protection is no longer expressly present.”

These policy shifts are part of an overall cultural shift as the pathetic creeps who run these tech companies and our world grovel at the feet of Donald Trump and his colleagues. Project 2025 explicitly called for “deleting the terms of sexual orientation and gender identity” and that’s what these platforms are starting to embrace — while their supporters take a more confrontational approach with their own chosen terms. Some of these men are probably just trying to earn favor from the current administration, others are likely thrilled to no longer have to pretend to care about us, either way the results are the same.

As an advocacy organization, GLAAD includes recommendations in their reports, recommendations that are likely to be ignored. They also state they are expanding their reach “by providing stakeholder guidance to additional tech and AI companies.” It helps no one to be cynical, so I feel genuine gratitude toward GLAAD for continuing this fight within the system. At the very least, it can’t hurt for these companies to know they are being watched even if it merely provides an annoyance as they march along toward their larger goals.

But as a journalist, a queer person, and someone who has been very online since my days as a lonely closeted teen on random forums, I’m unsure how to meet this moment. I feel like I’m in mourning for the virtual spaces that have provided community, education, and entertainment for most of my life. I’m grateful that many of these spaces have since led to IRL connections I can now lean on, but I feel sad for younger generations who won’t have that same opportunity. And, to be honest, I don’t know how to get all of you to read pieces like this.

It’s not just the social media platforms. Google is broken too. AI has made the search engine much less effective and it buries useful journalism, challenging art, and important information. I love the idea that we can go back to a more analog world, but unless people are about to start subscribing to daily newspapers, I don’t see how that’s possible.

What the GLAAD report makes clear is it’s not as easy as simply wading through the bullshit to continue using these social media platforms. The plethora of hate speech would take a toll on those with even the strongest constitutions. And their proliferation of misinformation is ensuring that the hate spreads even further.

For many years, these social media platforms have profited off of agitation and conflict. But, for awhile, their most horrible instincts were balanced with people who made it feel worth it. I feel that less and less. I still check Instagram sometimes, I still do my nightly scroll of animal videos, hot takes, and hot people on PG-rated TikTok, and I’ll even scratch the itch to tweet on Bluesky, the social media equivalent of watching MSNBC with my mother. Alas, none of this feels worth it or sustainable. And none of this is going to get people to read this article about queer people in international long distance relationships under Trump that I spent weeks reporting on and that a few years ago would’ve been shared widely on the app formerly known as Twitter.

So what’s the answer? I guess GLAAD will continue fighting for these tech companies to consider me a human being. Meanwhile, I’ll try to remember that back in the day connecting with even a hundred people on Tumblr felt like a miracle.

Read the entirety of GLAAD’s 2025 Social Media Safety Index here.

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