chargement...
Blamed for an online campaign that outed presumed gay and bisexual men in Morocco, Moroccan transgender influencer Sofia Taloni apologized for asking her followers to download a dating app to out gay men.
On Wednesday, the Turkey-based Instagrammer told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that her intention was not to «target gay men» but to «bring them closer to the mainstream society».
«My intention was to ‘humanize’, ‘un-demonize’ and ‘normalize’ gay people in Morocco so we stop thinking of them as outcast», she said with regret in an email interview.
«I literally wanted people to think of gay people as the man or woman next door and to stop the negative fantasy about who gay people are, how they look like and how they live», she added.
However, Taloni’s intentions resulted in an outing campaign that put several gay men in Morocco in difficult situations, especially as most of them were confined with their parents and families.
In mid-April, Taloni told her followers in an Instagram livestream to download a gay dating app and locate its Moroccan users. Her words quickly led to an online campaign that disclosed the sexual identity of several Moroccan men.
Users, however, had their photos posted online and were bullied and blackmailed because of the campaign, the same source reports.
Later that month, international NGO Human Rights Watch said that the campaign had several people expelled from their homes after their families stumbled upon their photos.
A 23-year-old gay university student told Human Rights Watch that he was kicked out of his home after his brother knew about his sexual orientation through the same campaign.
In a note, HRW urged the government to «both enforce the right to privacy and decriminalize same-sex relations», adding that such outing campaign may lead to «ostracization by their family and community, expulsion from housing by relatives and landlords, and dismissal from their jobs».
In Morocco, authorities announced by the end of April that an inquiry was launched to investigate the acts they described as «inciting violence and discrimination».
