2020 Winner
2020 Winners
Fondation Émergence
Pride Flagging
Fondation Émergence is a Montreal-based charity whose mission is to raise awareness and acceptance towards the LGBT community. In 2003, it founded the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHT), now observed worldwide. Held annually on May 17, the day is a rallying event that aims to better the situation of LGBT people all around the world.
Every year, Émergence picks an overarching theme/problematic for the IDAHT and develops a campaign, as well as informational material (guides, posters, pamphlets, etc.), made available freely in 20+ languages for schools/organizations around the world.
For 2019’s IDATH, Émergence decided to tackle a growing worldwide issue: the rise of cyber-homophobia and transphobia. Every 23 seconds, a homo/transphobic comment is posted online. Such comments are often not acted upon, reported, removed. The issue is getting worse as tech companies do little to actively track and remove such comments.
Raising awareness about the prevalence of online bullying/hate against the LGBT community is one thing. Motivating people to actively engage against it is another. Even if they’re shocked, many people will simply choose to ignore a comment or block a user.
Therefore, the objective of the campaign was to engage the public into being more vigilant and actively reporting hate-speech online.
Insights and Strategy
While the IDAHT campaign helped raise awareness around the issue of cyberhomophobia, Émergence also wanted to encourage a change of behaviour. For Pride Month, it set out to enable and empower people to do so by simplifying the task. We wanted to give people concrete, easy-to-use tools to take a stand and report hateful comments on social media. We had to get individuals to take action themselves because the large social platforms like Facebook and Twitter don't take enough proactive measures on their own.
One of the most public platforms, where all content published is readily accessible by the broad public, is Twitter. We explored ways to plug-in to the platform’s content.
The idea came from the fact that reporting cyberbullying of any kind online is difficult. There is no easy one-click button to do so. Same goes for specific hateful and inappropriate comments aimed at the LGBTQ2+ community.
Émergence Foundation had to develop its own tool that would connect to the platform and simplify the UX of reporting of homophobic and transphobic content.
Execution
THE IDEA
That’s how we came to develop “Pride Flagging”, a Google Chrome extension that automatically highlights homophobic comments on Twitter, and helps users report them with one click.
TECH / UX
Available worldwide for free at www.prideflagging.com and on the Chrome Web Store, Pride Flagging is a downloadable plugin that users can activate in their toolbar on Twitter. The extension automatically finds and covers offensive words or expressions with the colours of the Pride Flag, turning a symbol of inclusion into a tool against hate. The tool uses a comprehensive list of more than 50 derogatory terms targeting LGBTQ2+ individuals in 10 different languages. Users can also search specific terms. Once flagged, words are crossed with the colors of the LGBT Flag to be more visible. A simple shortcut is created to enable one-click reporting of the comments.
PROMOTION / SUPPORTING CHANNELS
The Pride Flagging app was promoted through Emergence’s owned channels and its LGBT ally network across the world, as well as a targeted PR push in Canada, which helped amplify the initiative’s reach in news outlets, blogs and radio shows. Users/allies were also invited to embed the extension’s code to their own site to encourage more people to download it.
From the get-go, the tool was approached as an “open source” project everyone could contribute to, in an effort to continually improve the UX, but also to adapt it to other platforms and browsers.
Results and impact
Since its launch, Pride Flagging raked 5,000+ downloads and helped flag tens of thousands of reported tweets. Dozens of accounts were also permanently banned. Twitter Canada saw an increase of 8% in reporting of hate speech since the launch. We teamed up with LGBTQ+ developer organization QueerTech to constantly improve the tool. The plan is to expand outside Twitter to all social media platforms in 2020-2021 to broaden its impact.