“All This Terror Because of a Photo’: Digital Targeting and Its Offline Consequences for LGBT People in the Middle East and North Africa”, 21 February 2023

State actors and private individuals across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have entrapped lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people on social media and dating applications, subjected them to online extortion, online harassment, and outing, and relied on illegitimately obtained digital photos, chats, and similar information in prosecutions, in violation of the right to privacy, due process, and other human rights. This report examines digital targeting in five countries: Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia.

Security forces have added these digital targeting tactics to traditional methods of targeting LGBT people, such as street-level harassment, arrests, and crackdowns, to enable the arbitrary arrest and consequent prosecution of LGBT people.

Based on 120 interviews, including 90 with LGBT people affected by digital targeting and 30 with expert representatives, including lawyers and digital rights professionals, this report documents the use of digital targeting by security forces and private individuals against LGBT people, and their far-reaching offline consequences. It also exposes how security forces employ digital targeting as a means of gathering or creating digital evidence to support prosecutions against LGBT people.

The targeting of LGBT people online is enabled by their legal precarity offline. In the absence of legislation or sufficient digital platform regulations protecting LGBT people from discrimination online and offline, both security forces and private individuals have been able to target them online with impunity.

This report does not investigate the possible use of sophisticated spyware technology and surveillance by governments, but rather how authorities across the five countries manually monitor social media, create fake profiles to impersonate LGBT people and entrap them on dating applications such as Grindr and social media platforms such as Facebook, and unlawfully search LGBT people’s personal devices to collect private information to enable their prosecution.

In most cases covered in the report, security forces and prosecutors used photos, WhatsApp chats, and same-sex dating applications, such as Grindr, on LGBT people’s phones as a basis for their prosecution and abuses against them. They targeted and persecuted people based on their presumed or actual sexual orientation or gender identity.

Each chapter in this report presents a different form of online abuse and describes how that abuse negatively affects a person’s offline life; the harms do not end with the violation of privacy but reverberate throughout a victim’s life, in some cases for years after the online abuse.

Key Recommendations

Digital platforms, such as Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Grindr, and Twitter, all of which have a responsibility to prevent online spaces from becoming tools of state repression, are not doing enough to protect users vulnerable to digital targeting. Digital platforms should invest in content moderation, particularly in Arabic, including by proactively and quickly removing abusive content that violates platform guidelines or standards on hate speech and incitement to violence, as well as content that could put users at risk.