This campaign brought together insightful data gathering with a powerful visualization to rally a community. By cataloguing instances of anti-LGBTQ+ hate and using them to unravel a Pride flag, we made an intangible threat to the community visceral and unignorable.

In the United States, governmental bodies and organizations have tracked an alarming rise in anti-2SLGBTQI sentiment – from acts of violence and protests at Drag Storytime events, to a record number of bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights in 2023.

This wave of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric had emboldened hate to grow across the border in Canada, as well. The problem was that while many U.S. organizations were closely tracking hate in their country, the last time the federal government of Canada had released data about anti-LGBTQ+ hate in Canada was in 2021 – based on incidents from 2020, when the world was in a pandemic lockdown.

Egale Canada is a leading advocacy organization whose mission is to save and improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people through research, education, and awareness. Through their work with many different queer groups across the country, they sensed that anti-LGBTQ+ hate had risen dramatically.

The problem? The federal government had stopped tracking anti-LGBTQ+ hate in 2021. Without any national data, the issue wasn’t getting the attention it needed and people believed the safety of Canada’s queer community wasn’t at risk.

In the lead-up to Pride month, Egale Canada wanted to make the issue of anti-LGBTQ+ hate unignorable and get people talking about what queer Canadians were facing.

To spark a conversation about anti-LGBTQ+ hate in Canada, we created the unravelled Pride flag – a flag with 6,423 missing threads. One thread for every hate-fuelled anti-LGBTQ+ incident we tracked ourselves, from just the first three months of 2023. We stopped at three months because if we included more, there wouldn’t be any flag left.

First, the unravelled flag was shared online by three diverse LGBTQ+ voices, who each shared their own stories of hate. Next, it was displayed at Pride events nationwide. Then, the flag appeared in print, out-of-home, digital, and social posts – all driving to a website with safety tips and a bank of social media assets, so people could create their own content to amplify our message.

Finally, the stories behind the 6,423 incidents were bound into a book using threads from the unravelled flag and sent to government officials to lobby for urgent action.

We measured anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in spaces where people gather: at in-person protests and on social media.

We started by tracking anti-LGBTQ+ protests in Canada using the ‘Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project’. Then, using social media analytics platform Infegy Atlas, we scrubbed 15 social media platforms (including Instagram, X, Reddit, and TikTok) against dozens of hateful terms used in conjunction with LGBTQ+ terms:

• HATEFUL TERMS: ‘groomer’, ‘pedophile’, ‘predator’, ‘death penalty’, ‘die’, ‘faggot’, and more (terms that surged in usage after the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill passed in Florida).

• LGBTQ+ TERMS: 10 terms including ‘drag queen’, ‘trans’, ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, and ‘queer’.

Finally, we removed anything with a positive sentiment. What remained was 6,423 incidents from just the first three months of 2023:

• January 2023 - 1,744 incidents

• February 2023 - 2,127 incidents

• March 2023 - 2,552 incidents

We felt that data alone wouldn’t grab people’s attention. So, we used the data we collected to create an unignorable visualization.

For each data point, we removed a single thread from a Pride flag. One thread was a vitriolic social post. Another thread was a violent protest outside a drag show. And another thread was a death threat.

To LGBTQ+ people worldwide, the Pride flag is a symbol of inclusivity, acceptance, safety, and the ongoing struggle for equal rights. By unravelling it, we showed that hate has been silently tearing a community apart.

The 6,423 incidents of hate we uncovered became a national news story – published by The Canadian Press and syndicated across the country. The campaign ultimately garnered over 73 million earned impressions from 110 news outlets.

The LGBTQ+ community and its allies took notice. Campaign assets were downloaded and used by individuals, labour unions, schools, research centres, and other advocacy organizations in tens of thousands of user-generated posts. We also saw over 11,500 campaign website engagements and safety toolkit downloads, arming our audience with information to stay safe during Pride.

The Canadian government acknowledged the threat against the LGBTQ+ community and pledged $1.5 million in emergency funding for Pride event security. Three months after the campaign launched, the government finally released its first report on anti-LGBTQ+ hate in over two years.

Finally, a post-campaign survey showed that 60% of people who recalled the campaign would donate to Egale Canada.