Social Media Giants Must Speak Out Against LGBTQ Persecution in Ghana | Opinion

In this age of recognition of LGBTQ equality, it’s hard to believe that legislation as draconian and odious as Ghana’s Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill could even exist—and more so, that tech giants purportedly dedicated to free expression could remain silent about it.

The United States recently enacted the Respect for Marriage Act to protect the same-sex marriage right recognized by the Supreme Court in 2015. Same-sex marriage has been enshrined in law in most of the United Kingdom for eight years, and in just the past few years, countries as diverse as Ecuador, Taiwan, Austria, Costa Rica, Switzerland, Chile, and Slovenia all have enacted marriage equality.

Yet if the speaker of Ghana’s Parliament succeeds with his plan, 2023 could be the year in which LGBTQ Ghanaians are fully criminalized merely for being who they are and advocating for their communities. According to the version published on the Ghanaian Parliament’s website, the bill that the speaker has made a political priority would criminalize being LGBTQ or an ally of LGBTQ people and would ban all speech on and offline that even remotely supports LGBTQ rights.

Despite this direct threat to online freedom of expression, tech giants have remained silent on the pending legislation. Twitter opened its first African office in Accra in April 2021—the month after this bill was introduced—citing Ghana as a “champion of democracy.” And Meta—parent company of Facebook and Instagram—frequently has trumpeted its success in bringing connectivity to Ghana through programs like Free Basics and Express Wi-Fi.

Ghanaian law has long targeted LGBTQ people and criminalized same-sex sexual activities. But this pending legislation, which recently passed its committee sittings in the Ghanaian Parliament, goes much further. The proposed law prescribes up to five years in jail for an individual who publicly identifies as LGBTQ or “any other sexual or gender identity that is contrary to the binary categories of male and female.” The sentence increases if the offending person identifies outside the so-called binary.

The bill also criminalizes identifying as an ally, such as anyone who “supports or advocates for the queer community,” forces intersex people to undergo “gender realignment” surgery, requires all relationships to adhere to unspecified “sociocultural notions” of the “relationship between males and females,” and threatens online platforms with criminal penalties if they do not restrict pro-LGBTQ content.

Nor would the bill’s harms be limited to Ghanaians. It would let Ghanaian authorities probe visa applicants’ social media accounts for pro-LGBTQ speech, as well as create lists of pro-LGBTQ supporters to be arrested upon entry into the country. Offenders could be forced into conversion therapy.

The paint of a rainbow peels off a brick wall. PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images

The provisions even outlaw any attempts to criticize or lobby against the restrictions after the legislation passes: Any attempt to promote “a change of public opinion” could be punished by a five-to-10 year prison sentence, making it even more important for the international community to vocally oppose and sink this bill before its enactment.

If this bill passes, sharing this article would be a crime.

Broad enforcement of such a bill could mean that any platform with inclusive public policies against hate speech and discrimination toward LGBTQ people would be shut down in Ghana—a blackout that would have dire implications both for human rights and for Ghana’s economy. Ghanaian authorities also could use legal processes to force platforms to identity LGBTQ people and their allies for investigation, prosecution, and incarceration.

Even before this bill was introduced, security forces in February 2021 raided and forced the closure of a newly opened LGBTQ center in Accra. One month later, 21 people were arrested in the city of Ho at a training event for paralegals and other professionals supporting vulnerable LGBTQ people. That’s on top of the regular violence, abuse, and discrimination regularly experienced by members of Ghana’s LGBTQ community.

Human rights groups feared this bill would be seen as a government endorsement of vigilante violence against LGBTQ people, and sure enough, Outright Action International and Rightify Ghana have documented rising bigoted violence since the bill’s introduction.

Rightify Ghana told our Electronic Frontier Foundation earlier this year that it’s crucial that companies touting their inclusivity and diversity as Twitter and Meta have now take a firm, specific stand against this cruel and oppressive legislation, and spell out how they’ll protect users in Ghana should it become law. But that hasn’t happened.

The companies’ silence now could result in the forced silence of uncounted Ghanaians in the future. The time to speak out is now, before the worst-case scenario comes to pass.

Paige Collings is a senior speech and privacy activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group headquartered in San Francisco.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.