
Trans activist and civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo has criticized Meta for allowing the anti-LGBTQ+ hate account Libs of TikTok, which is run by Chaya Raichik, to keep up a Facebook post targeting a transgender high school athlete.
Caraballo reported the post from the account which said, “A male just won the Girls [200-meter] Varisty in Sherwood, Oregon. He set a new record for the girls race. These high school girls just had their dream stolen from them because the school is catering the delusions of a boy who pretends to be a girl.” The post referred to Aayden Gallagher, a McDaniel High School track athlete who finished the race with a 25.49-second time.
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Caraballo said that the post inspired bomb threats against the school and said that Meta “clearly knew the history of this account inciting dozens of bomb threats along with violent imagery in her comments.” Indeed, Libs of TikTok’s posts have been connected to numerous death threats against medical professionals, children’s hospitals, public schools, educational officials, and places of business with transgender-inclusive policies.
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“These people on the oversight board are spineless amoral cowards running cover for a fundamentally evil company. They can lie to protect their conscience but the reality is they’re enabling horrific violence against vulnerable minorities,” Caraballo wrote on Bluesky while linking to an article by Meta’s Oversight Board explaining their decision to allow the post to remain publicly visible.
The board wrote that the post didn’t violate Meta’s recently rescinded rule forbidding “statements denying existence” (which was deleted in Meta’s January update). “Nor do the posts represent a ‘call for exclusion,'” the board wrote, “because there are no calls… for the transgender athlete to be ejected, disqualified from competition or otherwise left out.”
Meta also claimed that Gallagher is “a voluntary public figure who has engaged with their fame” since winning the race, making them fair game for public comment and criticism by social media users.
However, Meta’s post notes that some of its oversight board members disagreed with the decision, writing, “Such public figure status should not be applied to a child because they have chosen to participate in an athletics competition that created media attention driven by their gender identity, which is not within their control. This should not equate to voluntarily engaging with celebrity.”
Caraballo added, “I hope meta as a company burns to the ground. Nothing of value will be lost. Everyone from Zuckerberg on down are fundamentally evil people who will incite genocides as long as it increases shareholder value.”
The Oregon School Activities Association’s (OSAA) rules state “once a transgender student has notified the student’s school of their gender identity, the student shall be consistently treated as that gender for purposes of eligibility for athletics and activities provided that if the student has tried out or participated in an activity, the student may not participate during that same season on a team of the other gender.”
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