Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, announced sweeping changes on Tuesday to its content policies that will affect the way People of Color, LGBTQ+ people, and women safely navigate the internet.
Within pages and pages of nonsense, Meta laid out a plan to crucially weaken protections for marginalized groups. Lines of previous protections were brazenly crossed out in red.
In his video announcement, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pointed to the recent presidential election as the tipping point for the company’s changes.
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he claimed.
Under the new policy, billions of users on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads are free to accuse someone of having a mental illness because of their sexuality or gender identity.
“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,’” the revised company guidelines read.
Rules forbidding insults about a person’s appearance “based on race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease” have been removed.
Users can now call transgender or nonbinary people “it” without consequence and will be free to refer to women as “household objects or property.”
And it continues. “Statements of inferiority” will now be permitted. For example: “men are superior to women.” Claims that a person or group is responsible for the existence of COVID or for spreading COVID will no longer be removed.
Comments that “call for exclusion or use insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality” will be permitted.
Users can now freely argue for the exclusion of women and transgender people in military, law enforcement, and teaching positions, as well as “restrooms, sports and sports leagues, health and support groups, and specific schools.”
Claiming “all [protected characteristic or quasi-protected characteristic] are ‘criminals'” will also be permitted.
Under the former content moderation policy, these comments would have been removed. Now, racists, misogynists, and homophobes will be permitted to run amok on Mark Zuckerberg’s dime.
“Without these necessary hate speech and other policies, Meta is giving the green light for people to target LGBTQ people, women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups with violence, vitriol, and dehumanizing narratives,” GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis wrote in a statement. “With these changes, Meta is continuing to normalize anti-LGBTQ hatred for profit — at the expense of its users and true freedom of expression. Fact-checking and hate speech policies protect free speech.”
Meta also announced on Tuesday that it would eliminate fact-checking from its platforms and instead rely on “community notes” generated by users, similar to X.
Even Zuckerberg acknowledged the massive threat to public knowledge this will pose, saying “We’re going to catch less bad stuff.”
If you were searching for a reason to take a social media break this year, this may be it.
