Youth - Hope - Change

This past March, Ireland’s national LGBTQ+ youth organisation Belong To launched the ‘It’s Our Social Media’ campaign. The initiative sought to underscore the online abuse experienced by queer youth and the onus of social media platforms to abate hateful content. Joe Drennan interviewed two remarkable young people helping lead the charge.

A recent report released by Belong To showed disquieting levels of online hate, with 87 percent of young LGBTQ+ people having seen or experienced queerphobic hate and harassment on social media in the past year. Furthermore, only 21 percent of cases where users reported the behaviour saw action taken. It’s widely believed that this maltreatment of social media users comes with the territory. However, GCN spoke to two young members of the queer community who reject this sentiment.

The first, Ruairí Holohan, is a UNICEF Youth Advocate and sixth-year student from County Louth. Ruairí made local and national headlines in September 2022 for attending the UN General Assembly in New York. Even though he’s just 18 and at the beginning of his advocacy career, he’s continuing to champion LGBTQ+ issues in high circles – brushing arms with Tánaiste Micheál Martin and Queen of Spain Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano along the way.

He described the moment that inspired him to get involved in advocacy: “In second year, when we first got ‘the talk’ in school, I wondered why it was only about reproduction. Why was there nothing about the LGBTQ+ community? For all I know who’s here [in class], whether they’re out or not, all they can look at is what’s online. It’s uncensored, it’s inaccurate and it’s damaging for young minds.”

This led him to research the Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) programme in Irish schools, something he described as “not fit for purpose”. After finishing his work experience with UNICEF, he and his peers from the programme were presented with an opportunity that would eventually lead to him meeting with Micheál Martin in November 2020.

Throughout his budding career in advocacy, Holohan has experienced a complicated relationship with social media. He described on one hand how the different platforms have “truly shaped how many people my message has reached, nationally and globally.” He continued: “On the other hand, all this attention encourages hate. No matter what someone with a platform says on social media, they are destined for at least some negativity. I know from my experience; I have received quite a few negative comments. They vary from people who argue that homophobia isn’t an issue, to disturbing and hateful comments.”

This dichotomy in his social media kinship has been present in the student’s life since he was 15 years old. Despite the negative aspects, he has learned just enough to share advice with anyone else who wishes to follow a similar path. “My advice for young activists is to advocate through an organisation where possible. This protects you from directly receiving any sort of hate. At the moment, I do not advocate on my Instagram or Twitter accounts. I might do this in the future, but I don’t want to draw any hate towards my personal accounts.”