Human Rights Watch Takes LGBT Online Safety to New Heights With SecureOurSocials
Human Rights Watch launched #SecureOurSocials on January 23, 2024, a United States-anchored public interest campaign combining drag performance, dark humor, and direct platform accountability demands to protect LGBTQ people from dangerous social media targeting practices on Meta's Facebook and Instagram, with particular focus on users in the Middle East and North Africa.
The campaign centres on a short explainer video titled "Now Boarding Air Anya Flight to LGBT Safety Online," released one day early on January 22, 2024, through an exclusive partnership with NowThis. The video stars Anya Kneez, a Lebanese drag performer with experience across both Beirut and New York, and adopts the familiar visual grammar of an airline safety demonstration to communicate a pointed message: digital targeting produces real, offline consequences for LGBTQ individuals living in regions where their identities put them at legal and physical risk. The choice of format is deliberate, translating a globally legible cultural ritual into a vehicle for urgent human rights content.
Beyond the video itself, #SecureOurSocials operates as a fully integrated public interest action campaign. It pairs the entertainment-led film with an awareness guide explaining how LGBTQ people can protect themselves while using social media applications. Critically, the campaign also formally demanded that Meta disclose its annual investment in user safety, including how trust and safety resources are distributed proportionately across regions, languages, and dialects in the MENA region. Human Rights Watch sent Meta a letter on January 8, 2024, outlining these objectives, according to hrw.org. Meta responded on January 24, 2024, one day after the campaign's public launch. In the United States and globally, #SecureOurSocials represents what hrw.org describes as a strategic shift in Human Rights Watch's approach — moving from demanding accountability from governments toward demanding accountability from technology platforms. The campaign carried a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100.
Human Rights Watch identified a specific, documented harm as the strategic foundation for #SecureOurSocials. Dangerous social media targeting of LGBTQ individuals and communities in the Middle East and North Africa had created conditions where platform advertising and algorithmic systems were actively enabling offline harm, according to hrw.org. The campaign's strategic logic rests on the premise that platforms cannot claim neutrality when their targeting tools are weaponised against vulnerable populations in regions where homosexuality is criminalised.
The decision to focus accountability demands on Meta specifically reflects the structural reality of social media in the MENA region, where Facebook and Instagram remain dominant communication and community-building tools for LGBTQ individuals who may have no safe offline spaces. By demanding that Meta publicly disclose how trust and safety investments are proportionate to regional risk — broken down by region, language, and dialect — Human Rights Watch created a concrete, measurable ask rather than a generalised reputational pressure campaign. This specificity distinguishes #SecureOurSocials from broader platform-accountability efforts undertaken by organisations such as Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union, which have campaigned on digital rights but without this level of granular investment-disclosure framing directed at a single platform's MENA safety infrastructure.
The nonprofit digital media landscape in which #SecureOurSocials operates is substantial and growing. According to Grand View Research, the global nonprofit digital-media market was valued at approximately US$23.53 billion in 2024, with projections suggesting it could reach approximately US$49.27 billion by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of roughly 13.3 percent. In the United States, organisations deploying digital-first public interest campaigns compete for audience attention in an increasingly crowded information environment. Amnesty International's Write for Rights 2024 campaign, for example, generated more than 4.6 million actions across at least 200 countries and territories, according to amnesty.org, illustrating the scale that well-executed digital advocacy can achieve. Against this backdrop, Human Rights Watch designed #SecureOurSocials to earn attention through creative distinctiveness rather than media spend alone.
The creative execution of #SecureOurSocials is anchored in a single, sustained formal conceit. The campaign video adopts the airline safety demonstration format — one of the most universally recognised short-film genres in the world — and repurposes it as a vehicle for instructing LGBTQ social media users how to protect themselves from digital targeting. The choice of form is not decorative; it is argumentative. By framing online safety as a preflight briefing, the campaign implicitly positions platform-enabled harm as a predictable, systemic risk that users should be briefed on before every journey into digital space.
Anya Kneez anchors the video with authority that extends beyond performance. As a Lebanese queer drag performer with direct experience in both Beirut and New York, Kneez brings embodied credibility to the campaign's dual geographic reach. As quoted on hrw.org, Kneez stated: "As a Lebanese queer drag performer with experiences in both Beirut and New York, this campaign holds personal significance." That lived dimension gives the campaign's humor a grounding that prevents it from reading as detached satire.
The video was directed by M.A.Y.O., an award-winning directing collective with a cross-disciplinary portfolio spanning music videos, commercials, features, and television. M.A.Y.O. and Human Rights Watch's in-house campaigns team co-produced and developed the film, with sound design and mix handled by Sonic Union, an audio studio that Amanda Alampi, Director of Campaigns and Public Engagement at Human Rights Watch, described on hrw.org as having "a storied history of doing sound on award winning campaigns." Alampi characterised the broader collaboration as "a true marriage of human rights expertise with some of the best creative talent," per hrw.org. A wide range of Human Rights Watch subject-matter experts contributed to the project in the roles of creative directors, strategists, copywriters, and art directors — an unusual production structure that kept human rights knowledge embedded at every stage of the creative process rather than treated as a post-production briefing. The campaign launched simultaneously across Human Rights Watch's global and Arabic channels, according to hrw.org, ensuring the content reached both English-language and Arabic-speaking audiences in the United States and across the MENA region.
The #SecureOurSocials campaign reached more than 11 million people across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, according to hrw.org. That figure, achieved through a combination of earned media, platform distribution, and the NowThis exclusive partnership, represents meaningful scale for a public interest campaign operating without a disclosed paid-media budget. In the United States and globally, the ability to generate this level of organic reach for human rights content on the very platforms the campaign was critiquing carries its own rhetorical force.
The campaign received recognition as a 2024 Webby Award Honoree in the Social — Public Service, Social Impact and Activism (Video) category for "#SecureOurSocials — Now Boarding Air Anya Flight to LGBT Safety Online," according to Winners Webbyawards. The Webby recognition places the campaign within a curated peer group of the year's most formally accomplished social video work, lending external validation to the creative approach. Additional recognition came through the Shorty Awards, according to shortyawards.com, further confirming the campaign's standing within the public interest and digital advocacy creative community.
No independently verified conversion metrics — such as petition signatories, guide downloads, or demonstrable changes to Meta's stated safety investment disclosures — are publicly available at the time of writing. What the structural evidence does support is that the campaign achieved its primary awareness objective. The combination of a formally distinctive video, a talent choice with genuine community credibility, coordinated platform distribution, and a concrete institutional demand to Meta created the conditions for durable impact beyond a single news cycle. The Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its creative premise with confidence and achieves meaningful public interest reach, while leaving room for greater measurability in future iterations.
#SecureOurSocials is a 2024 Human Rights Watch public interest campaign demanding Meta improve LGBTQ safety on Facebook and Instagram. Launched January 23, 2024, in the United States and globally, it features drag performer Anya Kneez in an airline-safety parody video and asks Meta to disclose its trust and safety investment by region, according to hrw.org.
M.A.Y.O., an award-winning directing collective, directed the Air Anya video. M.A.Y.O. and Human Rights Watch's in-house campaigns team co-produced the film, with sound design and mix provided by Sonic Union. The campaign featured Lebanese drag performer Anya Kneez as on-screen talent, according to hrw.org and Little Black Book.
The #SecureOurSocials campaign reached more than 11 million people across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, according to hrw.org. The campaign launched simultaneously across Human Rights Watch's global and Arabic channels on January 23, 2024, and received an early exclusive release via NowThis on January 22, 2024.
Human Rights Watch received a 2024 Webby Award Honoree designation for #SecureOurSocials in the Social — Public Service, Social Impact and Activism (Video) category, according to winners.webbyawards.com. The campaign also received recognition through the Shorty Awards, according to shortyawards.com, affirming its creative standing within the public interest digital advocacy space.
Human Rights Watch used the airline safety demonstration format to communicate that digital targeting produces predictable, systemic offline consequences for LGBTQ users. The globally legible format made complex platform-safety concepts immediately accessible, according to hrw.org, while the humor and production value helped the campaign reach audiences beyond existing human rights communities.
Human Rights Watch formally asked Meta to disclose its annual investment in user safety, including how trust and safety resources are distributed proportionately by region, language, and dialect across the MENA region. HRW sent Meta a letter on January 8, 2024, according to hrw.org, and Meta responded on January 24, 2024, one day after the campaign's public launch.
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