Image source: Bild: Marco Verch, ccnull.de
By Sara Mercereau, researcher for the PROMPT project
Across Europe and beyond, the same themes keep coming back regarding anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation: trans women in sports, “woke” schools, “gender ideology” in institutions. They rarely appear as isolated flare-ups. New research from the EU-funded PROMPT project shows how these controversies are stitched into a wider disinformation ecosystem, where LGBTQ+ rights become a convenient battlefield for broader political and geopolitical struggles.
From isolated scandals to a narrative ecosystem
In recent years, transgender and gender-diverse people – especially trans women – have moved to the centre of online disinformation campaigns. These campaigns are often driven by right-wing or fundamentalist actors and target LGBTQ+ people not only as individuals, but as symbols of everything that is supposedly “wrong” with liberal democracies.
The EU has started to treat this as a structural issue. Under the Digital Services Act, gender-based violence is now recognised as a systemic risk that large platforms must address. Anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation is very much part of that risk: it blends harassment, hate speech and conspiracy-like narratives that can spill over into offline violence.
PROMPT (Predictive Research On Misinformation & Propagation Trajectories), a Horizon-funded project, looked at how these narratives work at scale. Using multilingual social media data from Twitter/X, Facebook and Instagram in spring and summer 2025, researchers identified the main storylines targeting LGBTQ+ communities and followed how they move between platforms and communities.
The result is clear: what looks like a stream of disconnected scandals is in fact a recurring narrative pattern, constantly adapted to new topics and events.
The core storylines
Several narratives keep resurfacing across platforms and languages. They rarely appear alone and often reinforce each other.
- LGBTQ+ people as a “corrupting influence” on morally “pure” societies
This is the single most frequent narrative in the filtered dataset, with 890 items flagged by the PROMPT Corpus Analyser.
Rather than being a front-page topic, it often sits in the background of other discussions. Posts about elections, Ukraine, or school policies insert LGBTQ+ references as a kind of moral compass: “corruption” of a pure social body is suggested rather than always stated.
CIB analysis shows that this narrative regularly co-occurs with:
- attacks on “gender ideology”, and
- anti-West / anti-EU storylines,
which means it can be easily plugged into other grievances. Whatever the surface issue, the corrupting-influence story is there to normalise exclusion as cultural self-defence.
- “Gender ideology” has captured institutions
This is the second most frequent LGBTQ+ narrative in the corpus, with 503 items. It claims key institutions – schools, courts, federations, media, regulators – have been “captured” and turned into vehicles for “gender ideology”.
The data show that:
- On Twitter/X, this storyline spreads through heavy reposting and coordination: a small number of accounts repeatedly push the same examples (school policies, sports cases, court rulings) as proof of institutional capture.
- On Facebook, the same narrative seeps into broader threads about elections, public administration, or Ukraine, so LGBTQ+ issues remain in the background even when not the main topic.
Qualitative review and CIB results confirm that this narrative is tightly linked to elite-resentment. Posts often move from “schools are out of control” or “courts have gone too far” to calls for very concrete crackdowns: bans, investigations, funding cuts at school-board, ministry, or federation level.
- The “natural family” and “natural order” under threat
The “natural family” narrative appears 299 times in the filtered dataset. It frames heteronormative families as the only legitimate basis for social and demographic stability and presents LGBTQ+ rights as a direct threat to that “order”.
The narrative comes in two versions:
- religious variants (“God’s design”, moral decay)
- secular ones (biology, common sense, demographic anxiety, parental authority)
In both cases, LGBTQ+ rights are framed as a direct attack on the “natural order” and/or “natural family structure”. Posts about parental rights, fertility or national survival easily slide into anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. Often, this is linked to anti-EU or anti-Western sentiment: defending the “natural family” becomes a way of rejecting “foreign” values.
- LGBTQ+ rights as Western cultural colonialism
In this narrative, LGBTQ+ inclusion is presented as a foreign imposition – a sign of a decadent West trying to export its corrosive values. PROMPT’s Corpus Analyser flags 255 items under this storyline.
The data show that:
- It pairs quickly with EU-sceptic and anti-Ukraine narratives: expressions like “Gayropa” or “West in decline” recur across communities.
- Even inside a focused LGBTQ+ query, you often find adjacent geopolitical storylines bundled in. The same posts discuss Pride, EU directives, NATO, or support to Ukraine as part of a single “civilisational” package.
- This narrative is especially visible on Facebook, where LGBT cues are grafted onto debates about sovereignty, corruption, and war.
The effect is to recode anti-LGBTQ+ messaging as national self-defence: rejecting “gender ideology” becomes a way to protect tradition, identity, and sovereignty against the West/EU.
- LGBTQ+ identities as a public-health hazard
This narrative is smaller in volume – 195 items – but strategically important. It treats LGBTQ+ identities and gender-affirming care as clinical dangers.
The findings show that:
- Communities cross-post content that pathologizes LGBTQ+ people and care practices, often using analogies with mutilation or irreversible harm.
- The framing moves the debate from “morality” to an alleged health emergency, without fully abandoning moral panic.
- This storyline often appears alongside “institutional capture” posts: hospitals, regulators or medical associations are portrayed as no longer independent, amplifying distrust in public health.
In practice, it upgrades “protecting children” into a seemingly evidence-based rationale for bans, funding cuts and audits, giving political measures against trans healthcare a scientific veneer.
- LGBTQ+ rights as a threat to child safety
The “child safety” narrative is less frequent in absolute numbers (175 items) but highly visible within coordinated communities. It claims that promoting LGBTQ+ rights endangers children through “indoctrination”, “grooming” and/or exposure to “inappropriate” content.
- On Twitter/X, the communities pushing this storyline are densely connected, with strong coordination patterns.
- On Facebook, the same frame appears inside broader threads (for example, under posts about elections or the war in Ukraine).
In those contexts, child protection becomes a moral geopolitical compass, as foreign-policy and electoral choices are presented as tests of civilisation.
CIB and rhetorical analysis show that this narrative frequently pairs with the “gender ideology” storyline. School cases and curricula are cited as proof that institutions have been “captured”, intensifying the sense that children need shielding from both content and institutions themselves.
- Integrity and safety of women’s sports
The “integrity and safety of women’s sports” storyline emerges clearly from coordination analysis as a major operational driver of anti-LGBTQ+ discourse, particularly around trans rights.
The data show that:
- Posts about trans women in women’s sports consistently attract high engagement across the dataset.
- Coordination analysis confirms that sports debates open up the conversation to other targets, such as schools and curricula, bathrooms and changing rooms, books and library shelves and hospitals and clinics.
- These conversations have a strong emotional pull, tapping into resentment over perceived injustice (“unfair advantage”, “stolen medals”) and fears around safety and bodily privacy.
The narrative on the integrity of women sports thus act as a socially acceptable “front door”, i.e., once the fairness premise (“we must protect women’s sports”) is established, it becomes easier to advance adjacent positions – tighter control over bathrooms, restrictions on books, investigations into hospitals – while keeping the framing on “integrity” and “safety” rather than explicit anti-LGBTQ+ hostility.
In practice, the “women’s sports” narrative functions as a bridge between identity-based claims and more mainstream concerns, helping anti-LGBTQ+ actors to broaden their audience and legitimize calls for wider rollbacks of rights and protections.
A shared toolbox of rhetorical devices & persuasion techniques
PROMPT’s analysis shows that behind these narratives lies a relatively small set of persuasion techniques and rhetorical tricks, used again and again.
Some of the most frequent persuasion techniques include:
- Casting doubt: hinting that schools, courts, hospitals, or media are hiding something – or have already been “captured” – without necessarily making a clear allegation.
- Appeals to authority: citing court cases, investigations or official reports in ways that suggest they confirm worst-case fears, even when they do not.
- Labelling and name-calling: “woke”, “groomers”, “radical leftist”, “biological males” – language chosen to provoke anger, disgust, and a sense of threat to one’s identity.
- Slippery slopes and false dilemmas: arguing that allowing trans girls in sports will “end women’s sports”, or that society must choose between “protecting women” and recognising trans rights.
- Over-generalisation: turning a single controversial story into evidence that “all schools are captured”, “all hospitals are corrupt”, or “the system is broken”.
These persuasion techniques are then reinforced by the strategic employment of rhetorical devices, such as hyperbole, loaded metaphors, stark oppositions (“parents vs elites”, “tradition vs woke”) and emotionally charged anecdotes. One sensational case becomes a symbol for a supposed civilisational crisis.
These rhetorical devices and persuasion techniques are mobilized to enact emotional reactions such as fear (for children, for bodily safety, for social order), anger and resentment (towards institutions and “elites”), and disgust (often fuelled by graphic or dehumanising language), combined with a more diffuse sense of loss of control.
Demonstrating polarization, many of these techniques are also used by pro-rights actors. Outrage appeals to authority and strong emotional language are not exclusive to anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation campaigns. The difference lies in how narratives are bundled, how consistently they target vulnerable groups, and how they are recycled across issues and platforms.
Two platform ecologies
The way these narratives travel also depends on the structure of each platform.
On Twitter/X, the conversation is largely activist-led. PROMPT’s analysis of top accounts in the LGBTQ+ corpus shows a tight cluster of conservative and reactionary voices dominating engagement. Handles such as Libs of TikTok, Gays Against Groomers, Matt Walsh or J.K. Rowling repeatedly appear among those generating the most reactions and shares.
A small number of accounts set the pace: they post frequently, clip and reframe content, and are quick to amplify stories that fit existing narratives. Mainstream news desks are relatively marginal in this space.
On Facebook, the picture is different. The largest actors in the LGBTQ+ corpus are mainly media outlets and professional pages. Titles like TELEGRAPH.CO.UK, HuffPost or LGBTQ Nation structure much of the visible conversation, even if anti-LGBTQ+ narratives still circulate in comment sections and smaller communities.
What both platforms share, however, is the intensity of attention. Posts about LGBTQ+ issues generate unusually high engagement per post compared to other topics studied by PROMPT, often in sharp spikes around particular controversies. For disinformation actors, this makes LGBTQ+ narratives an attractive tool: they are emotionally loaded, easy to plug into other debates, and reliably attention-grabbing.
Why this matters for journalism
For newsrooms, the PROMPT findings have several implications.
First, anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation is not just “a niche issue” affecting a minority. It is a way of moralising wider political questions: about trust in institutions, about who belongs to the nation, about the relationship with the EU or “the West”. Stories that appear to be about sports rules, school policies or hospital guidelines can quickly become vehicles for broader narratives about decay, capture and decline.
Second, focusing only on debunking individual claims may not be enough. Fact-checking is essential, particularly when specific claims about policy, law or health are used to justify bans a and/or restrictions. But the same narratives will often reappear in new forms, attached to new incidents. Understanding – and reporting on – the underlying storylines can help audiences see patterns instead of isolated scandals.
Third, it is important to recognise that anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation is closely tied to gender-based harassment and violence. Many of the posts in PROMPT’s corpus do not simply disinform; they dehumanise, pathologies and target LGBTQ+ people in ways that can encourage offline aggression. Treating these narratives purely as “controversies” risks normalising that harm.
PROMPT’s work does not provide simple answers. But it does make one thing clear: a small set of overlapping narratives, carried by a shared emotional and rhetorical toolkit, plays an outsized role in shaping how LGBTQ+ rights – and many other issues – are discussed online.
For journalists covering these debates, seeing the structure behind the noise is a first step towards reporting that informs without unintentionally fuelling the very narratives disinformation actors rely on.
This article draws on findings from the PROMPT Narrative Report on anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation, based on multilingual social media data collected between April and August 2025. PROMPT (Predictive Research On Misinformation & Propagation Trajectories) is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme and brings together researchers, journalists and civil society organisations to better understand how disinformation narratives travel across platforms and borders.
