The challenges of using social media to recruit participants for research on LGBTQ people and animal companionship

Recruiting participants via social media can seem appealing to researchers with limited funds or access to target populations. Yet such a recruitment strategy can be fraught by bad actors who may engage with social media advertisements in negative ways. In this commentary we share our experience of advertising on Facebook to recruit participants for a study on lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) people and their relationships with animal companions. We experienced a high volume of negative comments made on our advertisement, with people suggesting that our research focused on bestiality, that it was an attempt to “groom” animals, and that our research is a “slippery slope” to other nefarious agendas. We consider what it means for researchers reliant upon algorithms that may place us in harm’s way, and we also consider what it means to think about human–animal relationships among LGBTQ people in a social climate that continues to be hostile.