Meta has announced sweeping changes to moderation rules across its major platforms, allowing “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation” in what the social media giant says is a move to reflect current “political and religious discourse. The news was reported in multiple media outlets.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the changes via video on Tuesday, confirming that the changes to conduct and moderation practices would be implemented globally. The company’s platforms include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads.
While accusations of “stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness” related to a protected class of people remain officially against Meta’s rules, such language is now permitted “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’.” Denying the existence of transgender people is also newly permissible, as is referring to women as “property.”
Meta training documents leaked to The Intercept and Platformer reveal just how little protection is left under these new rules, which experts fear will have grave consequences for safety, both online and off.
[See more: LGBTQ students’ mental health is getting worse, research shows]
Other changes include the end of third-party fact checkers, deemed “too politically biased” by Zuckerberg, who said Meta would soon implement a “community notes” system similar to X (formerly Twitter). This crowdsourced approach to fact checking and moderation relies on regular users to make notes on false or misleading content and an algorithm to “identify notes that are helpful to a broad audience across perspectives” before they become visible to other users.
X, for all its visibility, has never had a userbase on par with Meta. Nearly 4 billion people use at least one Meta platform – including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads – meaning significant changes to their policies could have a major impact worldwide.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly appointed global policy chief and a staunch conservative, told the hosts of Fox and Friends that the policy changes were intended to promote free speech and nodded to both X owner Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump as champions of “free expression.”
However, X is frequently accused of being a platform for largely unchecked hate speech, with Musk himself frequently sharing anti-trans views (including about his trans daughter). Experts worry what the new rules will mean for Meta, whose platforms are used by nearly 4 billion people around the world, and paint a deeply concerning picture for the safety of women and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
