"... about the hospital’s gender-affirming care practices. In a statement, the Children’s Hospital told Teen Vogue they have 'been the target of a large volume of hostile internet activity, phone calls, and harassing emails including threats of violence toward our clinicians and staff.' In one tweet, Libs of TikTok called for the hospital to be shut down and in another, they claimed the hospital was providing hysterectomies to 'young girls' though
PolitiFact deemed that claim false. 'To qualify for a gender-affirming hysterectomy at Boston Children's Hospital, patients must be 18 or older and must have a letter from a medical doctor stating they have "persistent, well-documented, gender dysphoria," PolitiFact explained.['] But the viral tweet continues to make rounds online and feed into a growing moral-panic about gender-affirming healthcare stoked by right-wing personalities and politicians....
Social and legal affirmation, according to the [American Academy of Pediatrics], like haircuts and name and pronoun changes, can happen at any age, while treatments like puberty blockers typically start at the onset of puberty and certain affirming surgery, while sometimes performed on teens, typically takes place in adulthood."
[CORRECTION: I'm rewriting the post from this point onward, because I mixed up Facebook and Twitter, and what I had was confusing. I'm trying to retain the idea worth discussing while correcting the factual error.]
Here's a tweet from Libs of TikTok about how it was suspended from Facebook, told it was a final decision, but then reactivated. I don't know if that had to do with recent posts relaying video Boston Children's Hospital put out to promote
its own program. I don't think it's hate speech to
repeat someone else's speech, giving it higher profile and opening it up for debate among a larger and more diverse group.
Repeating speech and sending it out to a bigger, more diverse set of people should be basic freedom of speech on social media. Facebook and Twitter ought to adhere to viewpoint neutrality. They do need to censor direct threats to individuals, but I don't think Libs of TikTok made any threats. It only passed along the hospital's speech, and that speech was so controversial that it made other people generate "a large volume of hostile internet activity, phone calls, and harassing emails including threats of violence." If the reaction of other people counts against the sharer of speech, it would mean that the most outrageous speakers have a privilege not to be shared by anyone who has an audience who might become outraged. An illusion of agreement would be created around the worst ideas.
I see that Libs of TikTok —
just 4 hours ago — passed along video labeled "Yale Pediatric Gender Program director says she treats kids as young as THREE on their 'gender journey' including medical intervention." So it seems they are back in action, inviting everyone to absorb the message and think for themselves. There's nothing in the text of the tweet that can be characterized as misinformation (unless you're going to expand that term to include encouraging people to think their own thoughts instead of passively receiving the speech the way the speaker hoped you would receive it).
Is that what was different about the Boston Children's Hospital tweet? Did it contain a factual misstatement about the treatment?
And here's something Libs of TikTok retweeted 10 hours ago — Joe Rogan talking with Seth Dillon (of the Babylon Bee) about the censorship of Libs of TikTok:
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