GLAAD's 2026 Social Media Safety Index: Meta and YouTube Hit New Lows, TikTok Still on Top — But the Whole Floor Has Dropped

GLAAD released the sixth edition of its Social Media Safety Index this week, and the headline finding is grim: with the exception of TikTok, every major platform GLAAD evaluates scored worse than last year, and several hit the lowest score they’ve ever received in the report’s history.

The Social Media Safety Index has, since 2021, been GLAAD’s annual attempt to quantify how dangerous major platforms are for LGBTQ+ users — measuring written policy, enforcement, transparency reporting, ads systems, and product design. The 2026 scorecard rates six platforms: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter).

The 2026 scores, on a 100-point scale:

• TikTok: 56 (unchanged from 2025)
• Instagram: 41 (down from 2025)
• Facebook: 40 (down from 2025)
• Threads: 39 (down from 2025)
• YouTube: 30 (new low)
• X: 29 (new low)

Every Meta-owned platform is now in the low 40s or worse. YouTube and X are competing for the worst score in the report’s six-year history. TikTok, which has been the highest-scoring platform every year of the SMSI, stayed put — but a 56 is still a failing grade by GLAAD’s rubric.

What changed

The structural cause that the report keeps pointing back to is the Meta policy revision from early 2025, which is now firmly in place across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Under those revisions, Meta explicitly permits users to characterise LGBTQ+ people as “mentally ill” or “abnormal,” removed several content categories from its hate speech policy that previously protected trans and gender non-conforming users, and stopped treating certain misgendering and deadnaming behaviour as harassment. GLAAD’s argument has been that those weren’t editorial tweaks — they were category-level downgrades of how the platforms treat queer users.

Twelve months on, the SMSI’s research team says the consequences are now measurable. Reports of anti-LGBTQ+ harassment, hate speech, and targeted impersonation are up across Meta surfaces. Meta’s content moderation enforcement of its own remaining policies has dropped. Independent researchers cited in the report were able to repeatedly find ads that ran against anti-trans content without being flagged for brand-safety violations.

YouTube’s score drop is its own story. The platform updated its harassment policy in 2025 in ways GLAAD now formally categorises as a regression — narrower definitions of what counts as harassment based on protected characteristics, more permissive treatment of so-called “policy debate” content. The number of LGBTQ+ creators on the platform reporting demonetisation has continued to climb.

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is the one most readers will not be surprised to see at the bottom. The 2026 score reflects two trajectories: continued degradation of hate speech enforcement, and the platform’s effective abandonment of any meaningful transparency reporting since the 2023 ownership change. GLAAD notes that for the first time since the SMSI started, it cannot independently verify some of X’s claimed policy implementation because the platform no longer publishes the data needed to check.

What TikTok did differently

TikTok was the only platform that didn’t get worse. It also did not get better. The report credits TikTok’s hate and harassment policies as the most comprehensive among platforms evaluated, particularly in how they explicitly name misgendering and deadnaming as covered conduct. The platform also continues to publish more granular transparency data than its peers.

But TikTok’s 56 is not a recommendation. It’s a verdict on a baseline. GLAAD’s rubric considers anything below 80 to be inadequate.

There’s also a US-specific complication. TikTok’s regulatory situation in the United States — the ongoing forced-divestiture timeline, the legislative threats, the uncertainty about who will own the platform a year from now — looms over the report. A platform that scores well on LGBTQ+ safety but might not exist in its current form by 2027 is not the long-term answer GLAAD is looking for.

What it adds up to

The SMSI is not, by itself, going to change Meta’s content policy. GLAAD knows that. The report’s strategic purpose is to make the platforms’ choices legible — to advertisers, regulators, researchers, and the LGBTQ+ users who keep being told, every time a story like this comes out, that they should just leave the platforms.

The “just leave” argument has been complicated this year by something the SMSI calls out directly. For LGBTQ+ young people in much of the United States, social platforms aren’t optional infrastructure. They are, in some cases, the only place where it’s safe to look up information about being queer, to find community, to find resources. Massachusetts lawmakers, in the same week the SMSI dropped, were debating a social media bill that LGBTQ+ advocates pushed back against precisely because it would cut youth off from that infrastructure without offering any alternative.

The platforms know who depends on them. The 2026 score sheet is GLAAD’s argument that they should act like it.

The bigger picture

If you read the 2026 SMSI next to ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map and TGEU’s Trans Rights Index — the two big European rights rankings that landed in the same week — a pattern shows up. Three different research teams, working in different jurisdictions, all came to a version of the same finding: the institutions that say they care about LGBTQ+ people are not, in most cases, actually moving in that direction. Governments are coasting. Platforms are rolling back.

In all three reports, what’s holding the line is the user, the activist, the lawyer, the moderator who pushes for a stricter call. The infrastructure is degrading. The people on top of it are still doing the work.