“All Is Fair in… Meme!” How Heterosexual Users Perceive and React to Memes, News, and Posts Discriminating against Sexual Minorities

Abstract

Digital discrimination against sexual minorities is becoming prevalent. It increasingly spreads through discriminatory content that mixes text and images (e.g., memes), thus, making online discrimination more difficult to detect. The present survey study focused on digital content that is discriminatory towards sexual minorities, aiming to analyze whether a sample of heterosexual social network users (65.2% female; Mage = 27.13) perceived different forms of discriminatory content (i.e., memes, news, and posts) as equally offensive and to what extent such different forms elicited the same online behavioral reactions. Furthermore, we considered how individuals’ online network heterogeneity could influence their perception of digital discrimination. Results showed that individuals perceived memes as less offensive when compared to both news and posts. Accordingly, we also found that individuals took less time to react to posts when compared to the other forms of content. In addition, those who declared that they had a heterogenous online network perceived memes as more offensive than those who did not. Finally, regarding reacting behaviors, overall results showed that memes elicited few proactive behaviors and more acquiescent and ignoring behaviors than news and posts. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.