Ruslanas Kirilkinas: Men passing by, men get catcalled; you have to accept it, you get used to it

Friday, May 31, 2024

Delfi

A singer discusses homophobia in Lithuania, noting legal progress and platform moderation challenges.

🔗 Read the article on delfi.lt

[This is an automatically generated summary, for reference only]

A singer named Ruslan describes experiencing aggression and homophobia in Lithuania, noting that some people behave primitively. He highlights negative comments from young parents who promote hate against LGBT children. While real-life homophobia exists, he also observes that online trolls feel emboldened because they believe they can evade consequences. He is encouraged that Lithuanian law enforcement is sensitive to homophobic attacks, and he shared his experience winning a case against a biker who publicly insulted him. The text also mentions that Lithuania has made slow progress in improving LGBT rights, moving up in international indices, partly due to legal recommendations, although it lags behind neighbors like Latvia and Estonia. Regarding online hate speech, the portal “Delfi” uses subscriber requirements and moderators, while the smaller portal “Efsyn” personally curates comments and bans hate speech, though both acknowledge the difficulty of moderating social media platforms.

🔗 Read the original article

Previous page Are young people less pro-European than they used to be? The data suggests quite the opposite
Next page No one lives there. Parts of Europe are becoming depopulated

© 2026 Pulse - Europe beyond the beat


PULSE is an initiative for cross-border collaborative journalism in Europe co-funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement n. PO 4500158093.

PULSE is an initiative coordinated by OBCT that has been promoting intensive journalistic cross-border collaborations in Europe since 2024. Its main aim is to help strengthen the European public sphere by reporting on and telling stories from new and diverse perspectives.

At the heart of PULSE are 10 leading national news outlets (Delfi – Lithuania, Deník Referendum – Czechia, Der Standard – Austria, EfSyn – Greece, El Confidencial – Spain, Gazeta Wyborcza – Poland, HotNews – Romania, HVG – Hungary, Il Sole 24 Ore – Italy, Mediapool – Bulgaria) and three transnational organisations, including OBCT , n-ost and Voxeurop .

Additional outlets and journalists are involved as associate partners, including EUobserver , Føljeton (Denmark), H-Alter (Croatia), Levila (Estonia), Rubryka (Ukraine), and The Journal Investigates (Ireland).

PULSE is driven by a sort of virtual transnational newsroom made up of journalists from all the publications involved. It collaboratively produces new journalistic content on European issues on a daily basis, coming in many different languages. The editorial output amounts to over a thousand publications per year, mostly in article form.

PULSE also runs 4 thematic networks open to any European journalist interested in crucial issues such as EU enlargement, relations between the EU and other global powers, the EU’s green transition, or media and the information society. These networks function as online communities and periodically publish calls for pitches.