Gay Men “Outed” In Morocco After Photos Spread Online

An Instagram influencer with more than 600,000 followers is hunting down and outing gay men. Naoufal Moussa, a Moroccan trans woman living in Turkey, has outed gay men in Morocco and made them targets for discrimination, family alienation and violence. One of her victims has died by suicide.

But, Mousa, who goes with the name ‘Sofia Talouni’ online, is unapologetic. “I feel bad for those f****ts but I don’t care,” she said.

Through an Instagram Live, Mousa was teaching her followers how to download gay dating apps and create fake profiles to out gay and bi men.

“These apps will show you the people who are near to you. One hundred meters, 200 meters, even just one meter, just next to you in the living room,” Moussa said in the since-deleted Arabic video that was translated by activist Adam Eli. “Since everyone is together at home, it could show you your husband in your bedroom, it could show you your son who might be in the bathroom.”

Since her video has been posted many gay and bisexual men in Morocco, a country where both male and female homosexuality is illegal and can be punished to up to three years in prison, have been kicked out of their homes amid this global pandemic.

Facebook groups have been created to share screenshots of profiles from the apps. “We have been contacted by many people in distress following this campaign that has outed them to the people around them,” an LGBTQ activist told Morocco’s Le Desk.

Mousa's anti-gay campaign had already led to death. A 21-year-old Moroccan man found pictures of himself from an app being shared on Facebook and killed himself.

Although Mousa’s Instagram account was deleted by the social media giant, she has created a new account and says she will not stop.

“Don’t think that you deleted my account,” she said in another video. “That was international organizations. You… you’re just little Moroccan f****ts. No one cares about you.”

“Personally, if I ever find out that Morocco recognizes homosexuality, I’m the first one that’s going to stand up,” Moussa said in part of her come-back video that was posted to Twitter. “We shouldn’t recognize homosexuality. We are an Islamic country.”

‘LGBTQ Nation’ reports that Human Rights Watch is looking into the situation and has noted that a big part of the problem is Morocco’s law that criminalises homosexuality.

“The law inherently discriminates against LGBTQ people, so it can only be an incubator for this type of abuse,” said Ahmed Benchemsi of HRW. “Homophobic people feel empowered because the law is on their side.”

Planet Romeo CEO Jens Schmidt said that the company sent a message to its users in Morocco.

“We were shocked when we were contacted by an LGBT group in Morocco,” Schmidt said. “We took immediate action by sending a security message to all of our 41,000 users in Morocco, we blocked all profiles created from the time this person addressed her users and contacted Facebook to have the group page taken offline.”

Facebook has said that it’s trying to stamp out the groups that are outing people in Morocco.

“We don’t allow people to out members of the LGBTQ+ community. It puts people at risk, so we remove this content as quickly as we can,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

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