Abstract

The objective of this research was to describe the attitudes to LGBTIQ+ visibility presented in the comment section to news written by the Chilean press and published on Facebook pages between the years 2019 and 2020. The concepts of visibility and attitudes are addressed in the frame of reference, specifically, prejudice, discrimination, and stigma. The role of social media services (SM) in LGBTIQ+ visibility is explained. Employing a qualitative methodology and the main techniques of empirical grounded theory, the data obtained from the natural observation of comments on Facebook posts that met the eligibility criteria was progressively analyzed. The corpus was made up of 2879 comments extracted from 8 pieces of news. An analysis of inductive content was carried out by using open coding and coaxial coding. The verbal and graphic content of the comments was systematized in categories that organize gradually the comments from more positive attitudes to more negative ones. The positive attitudes champion the importance of LGBTIQ+ visibility, the right to comprehensive healthcare, the right to equality, and respect. The negative attitudes are mainly related to moral principles related to religion, family and/or cisheteronormativity, and, in the most extreme cases, they validate hate speech towards LGBTIQ+ people. Understanding the attitudes towards the visibility of LGBTIQ+ people would be an important component for the design of educational strategies on sexual and gender diversity in social media services (SM). © 2023 by Psykhe