Gay Parent Magazine and Washington Blade have taken steps to remove the Gay Parent Magazine Facebook page and warn LGBTQ media publications that appear to be organized fraudulent manipulations that attempt to infiltrate Blade’s Facebook page.
The actions of gay parent magazines and unidentified con artists targeting blades appeared to target LGBTQ media outlets that aimed to harm or disable LGBTQ support publications.
“There is a strong reason to believe that the Facebook page hacking was politically motivated,” Acain said in a July 7 statement. “We were targeted by people who didn’t support LGBTQ parents,” she said.
Acain and Naff said they were contacted by email from someone who claims to be pro-LGBTQ commentator podcaster Jennifer Welch.
“When I accepted, she was doing interviews via Facebook Live, so I emailed her to set up a zoom call to review the technical requirements,” says Naff. “When I connected to Zoom, she wasn’t on the camera, so the man’s voice said he would handle her technical support. He told me to log in to the admin page of Blade’s Facebook account and share my screen,” Naf said. “It refused the request and ended the call when I was suspicious.”
Naf said he hadn’t heard anything from them since then.
Acain told Blade that she regrets agreeing to provide access information to the publication’s Facebook page when she was invited to appear as a guest on the Jennifer Wellchi Podcast.
“We somehow gave them access,” Assein said. “I don’t know exactly how they did that, but they knew what I did and what they should do to get access.”
In a statement on July 7th, Acain said: “In this attack, the bad actor posed as a host of a liberal podcast and invited guests to say the podcast would be live streamed on their Facebook page. They were then hacked to the Facebook page of Gay Parent Magazine and deleted their followers.
She said she had 30,000 followers before being hacked on her Facebook page. Since then, she said she and her team at Gay Parent Magazine have been taking steps to rebuild their Facebook page and rebuild their viewers and followers.
Acain also said in her statement that the Facebook hack for her publication came about five months after the Facebook page was attacked by Trolls for posting hateful comments to LGBTQ parents. She said a barrage of hateful posts began shortly after Donald Trump took office as president.
“After reporting hateful comments, blocking trolls and limiting who could comment, the hate rhetoric finally stopped,” she said.
“In the 26 years since I published this has never happened,” she told Blade. “Everything has happened since Trump became president.”
“This is clearly an organized right-wing effort targeting strange media outlets,” Naf said in his own statement. “I’m immediately warning LGBTQ media contacts of this scam,” he said, adding that his personal Facebook account is also targeted by people who post anti-gay slurs.
An anti-LGBTQ post that Acain Reports began targeting Gay Parent Magazine’s Facebook page, two well-known LGBTQ advocacy organizations, Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and GLAAD, have issued a powerful language statement criticizing Mark Zuckerberg, who criticizes the CEO of a company that owns and operates Facebook and Ending Anti-LGBTQ outlets to curb tensions between Facebook and other LengtQ.
In a statement on January 7th, Glaad said the policy changes made by Meta “removed and adopted several sections of the hateful action policy and rolled back safety guardrails for LGBTQ people, people of color, women, immigrants and other conservation groups.”
In a unique statement released on January 15th, HRC said: “When Mark Zuckerberg announced the sweeping of Meta’s content moderation policy, he framed the move as a bold defense of free speech. Community.”
Meta says the policy changes aim to increase and reduce freedom of speech on social media platforms like Facebook.
Blade couldn’t immediately confirm whether other LGBTQ media were being targeted by anti-LGBTQ scammers.
Source: Washington Blade: LGBTQ News, Politics, LGBTQ Rights, Gay News – www.washingtonblade.com
