When security spills over: Negotiating LGBTI+ security through the regulation of disinformation

ongoing

In recent years, promoting LGBTI+ rights and countering disinformation have become pressing priorities for several Western governments. Due to the potential for disinformation to fuel discrimination, hostility, and violence against vulnerable groups, these two objectives are increasingly intersecting in local, regional, and international political processes. To regulate disinformation, particularly on social media, state actors worldwide have primarily resorted to a security rhetoric, presenting the issue as an existential threat to security, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. While many scholars have explored how disinformation campaigns are impacting the advancement of LGBTI+ rights, we still know very little about how this specific agenda has been incorporated to justify the securitisation of disinformation. Even less is known about the role LGBTI+ civil society has played in this process—a sector that is highly affected by the spread of false narratives but is also increasingly reliant on the services provided by these platforms to connect with the community, launch awareness campaigns, and raise funds. How they position themselves vis à vis the state, private sector and other actors in the regulation process? And how is the engagement in this field shaping the claims of LGBTI+ organisations for “protection”? SECURE will analyse how the security discourses and practices from the anti-disinformation field are spilling over into LGBTI+ rights. Through a comparative study between Poland and Brazil, two countries that have recently experienced intense polarisation around LGBTI+ rights related to the spread of disinformation, the project will develop a transferable theoretical framework to analyse multilevel security spillover processes and theorise about the current shift from “equality” to “protection” in “LGBTI+ governance”—the ways in which LGBTI+ people and ideas are incorporated into state, state-like, and state-affiliated power.