2024 Social Media Safety Index

2024 Social Media Safety Index Platform Scorecard

The 2024 SMSI Platform Scorecard consists of twelve indicators that draw on best practices and guidelines from the Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) Big Tech Scorecard.^[1] The Scorecard evaluates six major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Threads (whose parent company is Meta), TikTok (parent company: ByteDance); X (formerly known as Twitter), and YouTube (parent company: Alphabet/Google).

The Scorecard was developed in 2022 in close collaboration with Goodwin Simon Strategic Research (GSSR), Ranking Digital Rights (RDR), expert stakeholders working at the intersections of technology and human rights, and input from the SMSI advisory committee. In creating the Scorecard, GSSR utilized RDR’s evaluation, methodology, and scoring processes and guidelines. Full details can be found here. In essence, the companies receive an average score of their performance across all the indicators evaluated. Each indicator has a list of elements, and companies receive credit (full, partial, or no credit) for each element they fulfill. The evaluation includes an assessment of disclosure for every element of each indicator. As part of the process, following RDR’s methodology, all companies are invited to provide written feedback as well as additional source documents. For this year’s process, all the companies evaluated actively participated in the feedback process. Note that these 12 indicators only address some of the issues impacting LGBTQ users. Further, the recommendations below reflect only some of the important steps that companies should take. Much greater detail and analysis can be found in the 2024 Research Guidance. The full scoring sheets are also available here.

An Important Note About The Scorecard Ratings: As mentioned above, the SMSI Scorecard does not include indicators to rate platforms on enforcement of their policies. GLAAD and other monitoring organizations repeatedly encounter failures in enforcement of community guidelines across major platforms. However, given the difficulty involved in assessing enforcement methodologically these failures are not quantified in the scores below.

SMSI Platform Scorecard LGBTQ-specific indicators

1. The company should disclose a policy commitment to protect LGBTQ users from harm, discrimination, harassment, and hate on the platform.
2. The company should disclose an option for users to add pronouns to user profiles.
3. The company should disclose a policy that expressly prohibits targeted deadnaming and misgendering of other users.
4. The company should clearly disclose what options users have to control the company’s collection, inference, and use of information related to their sexual orientation and gender identity.
5. The company should disclose that it does not recommend content to users based on their disclosed or inferred sexual orientation or gender identity, unless a user has opted in.
6. The company should disclose that it does not allow third party advertisers to target users with, or exclude them from seeing content or advertising based on their disclosed or inferred sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the user has opted in.
7. The company should disclose that it prohibits advertising content that could be harmful and/or discriminatory to LGBTQ individuals.
8. The company should disclose the number of accounts and pieces of content it has restricted for violations of policies protecting LGBTQ individuals.
9. The company should take proactive steps to stop demonetizing and/or wrongfully removing legitimate content related to LGBTQ issues in ad services.
10. The company should disclose training for content moderators, including those employed by contractors, that trains them on the needs of vulnerable users, including LGBTQ users.
11. The company should have internal structures in place to implement its commitments to protect LGBTQ users from harm, discrimination, harassment, and hate within the company.
12. The company should make a public commitment to continuously diversifying its workforce, and ensure accountability by periodically publishing voluntarily self-disclosed data on the number of LGBTQ employees across all levels of the company.