ILoveGay.NET

X removes Pink Media and the #ILoveGay Network – and other rainbow accounts – suppressing over 1 million LGBT+ voices. Who’s next?

X has long since ceased to be a friendly social media platform. Where the trolls used to be the biggest disruptive factor, X itself is now a suspect in a large maze of censorship, politics and discrimination. Its reach is still large, but the reports about fake news, AI and targeted discrimination are seriously damaging the medium.

The Musk effect

It was of course to be expected that the acquisition of Twitter would lead to changes from Musk’s unfathomable universe. His interview with Trump – of course announced as ‘the greatest interview in history’ – was a poignant example of how he sees the world, and all too often he has made disparaging remarks about minorities or people with different opinions.

It also goes seriously wrong where Diversity is concerned. Typically, even earmarked opponents turn into allies when the issue enters their personal bubble: think of Cheney and his lesbian daughter. With Musk, it was the opposite. One of his children is trans daughter Vivian, but instead of supporting her, he vocally opposed California’s legislation protecting trans people. Perhaps the fact that Musk has 12 children also plays a role: they never got the attention they deserved from their fathers, certified. Meanwhile, he’s threatening to move X and Space X from California to Texas in revenge – but he’s done that a few times before.

Several anti-LGBT accounts that had previously been banned from the platform were reinstated, and Musk temporarily lifted a long-standing policy of misgendering trans people. He also previously promised to ban the word “cis” from the platform, arguing that the word “cisgender” is an insult to people whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.

Rainbow Voices

One of the most important American marketing platforms in the LGBT area is Pink Media. They advise brands and companies on Marketing the Rainbow, a theme that has been in the spotlight lately with terms like ‘woke’ and the Bud Light drama.

On July 4th of this year, ironically Independence Day, X deleted all Pink Media accounts. This was done based on what they called ‘a user report’, in which it was said that they had broken “one of the X rules”. Which rule was not specified, nor was the user who did report it, of course.

But…

There is something fishy going on. Pink Media had built up a network of profiles with different goals and themes, such as a whole series under the name #ILoveGay, such as #ILoveGayMusic, #ILoveGayTourism and #ILoveGayAmsterdam. This was allowed on the platform, and in this way posts could be done more targeted and named with hashtags. It also generated a lot of traffic to other platforms and the ILoveGay website.

What is striking is that all their profiles, including the more business-oriented ones that were not part of the #ILoveGay network, and a few profiles that had not been used for years, were all suspended at the same time. This can only really have been done internally by X. It suggests that someone within X had done their homework and that this was a well-researched and prepared removal of a network of LGBT+ X profiles with over 1 million followers worldwide.

Pink Media also discovered that X had removed a wide range of LGBT+ tourism profiles, including Palm Springs’ Gay Desert Guide, Alan Beck’s FunMaps and the GayBritain account of the respectable Visit Britain. Not much later, the otherwise ‘clean’ accounts of gay dating platform Romeo were also removed, without warning or explanation. This is one of the largest such platforms in the world.

Why on X?

Pink Media: “We are aware that people reading this will roll their eyes and wonder why we stayed on X at all, when so many leading LGBT+ organizations had already left the platform. For us, the answer was simple: we reached an audience around the world that could not be reached with the same impact on Facebook, Instagram, Threads or TikTok. Each profile spoke to a very specific LGBT+ -audience, both regionally and thematically. Each profile stayed true to that audience, engaging with and sharing content specific to that region or theme.

What are people searching for on X?

So over 1/3 of users find X useful in terms of brands, i.e. marketing.*

Okay, they lost 32 million users since the acquisition and usage in the US dropped 23%, but they still have – just sayin’ – 666 million users, half of whom are on X every day. This puts them in 12th place in the world ranking of social media.

While Musk bought the platform in 2022 for $44 billion, it is currently valued at around $15-19 billion.

Viral

For Pink Media, Pride Month June was a very strong month. One of their clients had a simple advertising campaign targeting the #ILoveGayMusic audience. With organic reach, coupled with some targeted advertising investment, those posts went viral, reaching over 17 million video views. This kind of performance is nearly impossible to achieve on any other platform when the budget is $5,000 or less, and it was this kind of performance that they really excelled at with their #ILoveGay X strategy.

Politics

Was it the strength of this campaign that put them on the X radar? Or maybe it was the attention they received in the news cycle that month? Here, they were interviewed for articles focused on Corporate America, which was largely on the sidelines when it came to Marketing the Rainbow for Pride Month. Several right-wing blogs picked up some of these interview segments and angrily emphasized the idea that companies should focus on business and stay out of “politics.”

* More info and stats on Backlinko.

Alfred Verhoeven is a marketer and is in the final phase of his PhD research Marketing the Rainbow.
He previously wrote for ILOVEGAY about From Representation To Respect, Pride Month, The Oldest Rainbows, The Dutch Rainbows, The Belgian Rainbows, The Chinese Rainbows, Super Bowl Ads: What Would Jesus Do?, Get woke, go broke, Spain has 6.8 billion reasons to love rainbow tourists, Everyone’s gay in Amsterdam, Gay Capital, The Ideal Traveler, Abercrombie & Fitch : The Rise & The Fall, Barbiemania, Bud Light and the 4 bln dollar woman, Pronouns, About those rainbows, Alphabet soup, M&M’s and the lesbian invasion, The Men from Atlantis, 5 Bizarre LGBT Videos, TRANSparency, Transgender persons as a target group, 5 videos that went viral, Cultural sensitivities and social involvement in marketing, and 4 reasons to practice diversity.