Instagram's army of hyperlocal anti-trans influencers

Last week was our last Garbage Day Live show in New York for the year. But we do have one more surprise for our New York readers… and listeners 😉

Our FIRST EVER live taping of Panic World is at Caveat in Manhattan on November 28th. It’s a live taping of our annual “Worst Things On The Internet” episode. So you should expect it to be very, very unhinged. Hit the button below to grab a ticket!

—by Josh Chapdelaine, Adam Bumas, Lester Feder, and Ryan Broderick

We can’t always talk about the work that Garbage Day’s consulting arm, Garbage Day Media Intelligence (GDMI), does, but today, we’re pulling back the curtain on one important project we’ve been running this year. For the last six months, we’ve been working with the Transgender Law Center, a national organization promoting trans equality. Our research has taken down us the rabbit hole of anti-transgender content on short-form video platforms. And what we found surprised us.

TLC tasked us to research online discussion about anti-transgender ballot initiatives up for vote this week in five states. Most of these proposals aim to restrict trans girls from participating in sports and/or prohibit gender-affirming care for minors. A Washington state proposal could also force schools to out trans kids to their parents. 

We know that much of the anti-trans content on social platforms right now is there because Republican candidates and big-money supporters like Elon Musk are footing the bill. They hope to repeat the apparent success the Trump campaign had in 2024 with ads claiming “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you.” 

Things have gotten particularly absurd in Texas. A group called Citizens for Sanity used AI for an ad depicting James Talarico in a dress singing about changing kids’ gender. Another ad from Musk’s America PAC asks, “Tired of grown men dunking on female athletes?” as a (possibly AI-generated) adult drag queen makes a basket in front of sad-looking girls. A shady group, represented in court by a former Ken Paxton aide, is accused of sending a mailer to Texas students with information about gender-affirming care and evading restrictive parents under the name of a real Texas non-profit, the Transgender Education Network of Texas, in an apparent attempt to boost Republican turnout. 

As this week’s midterm election grew closer, Republican anti-trans messaging became so inescapable and annoying that even users in the r/conservative subreddit started whining about it. “I understand the angle they’re going for, but dang,” a redditor named zebtacular wrote. “My kids didn’t even know what transgender meant until these ads started airing. Now they’re hearing about it constantly.”

And according to our research, yes, users in these five states are, in fact, hearing about it constantly, usually in the form of paid content from Republican candidates and their allies. Organic content looks very different, and is not impacting every platform equally. A relatively small network of accounts on Instagram — most of which are connected to well-funded political groups — are responsible for the lion’s share of anti-trans content about the ballot initiatives. But these accounts are largely absent on TikTok, or get very little traction when they post there. And we’ve been trying to figure out why.

Both TikTok and Instagram are controlled by oligarchs close to the Trump administration, so you’d assume both are seeing the same levels of anti-trans content. We initially thought that the difference might have something to do with the platforms’ algorithms. The former is a Frankenstein’d hand-me-down from ByteDance, the latter is Meta’s best approximation of how it thinks ByteDance’s algorithm used to work.

Garbage Day reached out to both TikTok and Instagram for this story and asked how their algorithms treated videos featuring localized anti-trans content. Instagram referred us to Meta’s public policies, which says Meta “may recommend political content from accounts people don’t already follow.” We sent them follow-up questions about whether or not Instagram recommends content based on their location, and they just sent us a link to an FAQ page about how their algorithms work. TikTok was a little more forthcoming, thankfully.

A spokesperson for TikTok US told Garbage Day that the only thing that determines what shows up on a user’s For You Page is how they interact with the app. Meaning that if a user isn’t actively watching or seeking out videos about these ballot measures, they won’t see more of them. We’ve seen evidence that TikTok’s algorithm has changed since ByteDance was forced to sell the app earlier this year, but this may be the real reason why these videos aren’t making it as far on the platform.

In other words, if you’re using a platform that algorithmically recommends stuff you might be interested in, rather than what your weird neighbor is ranting about in his pickup truck, you probably won’t see any anti-trans stuff because no normal person actually cares about it.

We’ve been watching Colorado most closely, helping TLC and LGBTQ+ advocacy group One Colorado’s campaign to defeat the anti-trans ballot initiatives there. From October 14th-21st, anti-trans posts earned more than 50,000 impressions on Instagram. Almost all of that came from a handful of accounts, such as Erin Lee, Jennifer Sey, Amber Adames, Athletes for Action, and Sisters on the Run.

The most active anti-trans account in Colorado by far is Lee, founder of Protect Kids Colorado and self-described “Mom 💪🏼” who is “fighting for parental rights and against gender ideology.” She’s one of the most influential creators publishing anti-trans content on Instagram. Her videos collectively earned hundreds of thousands of impressions in October. In a state with six million people, Lee is responsible for a significant amount of engagement supporting the proposition. She’s consistently getting five-digit view counts on videos (which is pretty good for a local influencer). And we’ve seen similar patterns in other states.

Examining these initiatives has also been an interesting window into how localized social media still is even in our increasingly nationalized, algorithmic feeds. In Washington state, the anti-trans discourse is driven almost entirely by a single hedge fund manager. Brian Heywood’s Let’s Go Washington! PAC generated almost all of the views for anti-trans content on Instagram. Videos range from anecdotes from high school students about perceived unfairness in sports to former Olympic athletes who argue sex is immutable. Let’s Go Washington is also posting on TikTok, but its videos are getting virtually no traction there.

The network of both local influencers and major national accounts, like LibsOfTikTok, use collaborations on Instagram to amplify anti-trans content. Lee collaborates with similar hyperlocal creators and organizations to earn tens of thousands of views per post. Two videos published September 30th and October 6th have earned more than 140,000 combined views through this network.

But we could not find any evidence of a similar network operating on TikTok. In fact, most of these hyperlocal TERFs don’t even use the platform. And if they did, they’d probably have a tough time gaining any traction.

A small Colorado-based TikToker named Chez Jenna in early-October published Colorado ballot guides opposing anti-trans propositions that earned hundreds of thousands views. Another local TikToker named Robert Morris routinely publishes videos to tens of thousands of people explaining why Coloradans should vote against the same propositions. And it’s possible this is true offline, as well.

There’s almost no public polling on ballot measures in any of these states. National polls have generally found support for many of the proposed policies, though such theoretical support for a proposal doesn’t always translate into yes votes when voters decide on specific ballot language. So we’ll find out tomorrow if this Instagram surge really helped.

What seems clearer is that anti-trans messaging doesn’t seem to be working very well for Republican candidates. In 2024, the “Kamala is for they/them” attack landed largely as a shorthand for the Democrats being out-of-touch with the affordability concerns that were top of mind for most voters. Now that Republicans own the economy, their obsession with transgender people seems to be making them seem like the ones out of touch.

That’s not to say that harm hasn’t been done. As the ACLU’s Gillian Branstetter recently wrote for The Nation, while this strategy doesn’t seem to be setting Republicans on a course to victory, “this strategy has been successful is in rendering transgender people as politically isolated as we’ve ever been.”

And, like every other bad thing that’s happened in this country politically since 2016, this silent algorithmic war against trans people in towns across the country is the direct result of Meta’s anticompetitive business practices.

When Instagram launched Reels in 2020, it didn’t just make a clone of TikTok. It placed a bootleg of TikTok on top of an existing social network. Prior to 2020, Instagram mostly just showed you content either made by or shared by people you knew. It was a social network that, like all of Meta’s other platforms, emphasized sharing between your friends and family and neighbors. Which is not how TikTok works.

TikTok’s algorithm is still as good as it is because its power over what you see on the app is absolute. If something is popular on TikTok, it’s because the algorithm has decided that, with no exceptions. Whereas Instagram Reels is basically every crazy person at your kid’s little league game on shuffle. Which, it turns out, is the perfect machine to run a Republican hate campaign!

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