Meta today announced a series of major updates to its content moderation policy, including ending its fact-checking partnerships and “eliminating” restrictions on speech on “topics such as immigration, gender identity and gender” that the company describes as frequent topics of political discussions. discourse and debate. “It's not right that things can be said on TV or on the conference floor, but not on our platforms,” Meta's newly appointed Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan wrote in a blog post outlining the changes.
In an accompanying video, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the company's current rules in these areas as “simply out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
Along with this announcement, the company has made a number of updates to its Community Guidelines, a comprehensive set of rules that outline what types of content are prohibited on Meta's platforms, including Instagram, Threads and Facebook. Some of the most notable changes were made to Meta's “hateful conduct” policy, which includes discussions about immigration and gender.
In a notable shift, the company now says it “allows allegations of mental illness or abnormalities when based on gender or sexual orientation, given the political and religious discourse around transgenderism and homosexuality and the common non-serious use of words like ' weird'.”
In other words, Meta now appears to allow users to accuse transgender or homosexual people of being mentally ill because of their gender expression and sexual orientation. The company did not respond to requests for clarification on the policy.
Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss told WIRED that these restrictions will be eased globally. When asked whether the company will adopt different policies in countries with strict rules on hate speech, Chambliss pointed to Meta's current guidelines for addressing local laws.
Other significant changes made to Meta's Hateful Conduct policy on Tuesday include:
- Removing language that prohibits content that targets people based on their “protected characteristics,” including race, ethnicity and gender identity, when combined with “claims that they have or are spreading the coronavirus.” Without this provision, it might now be within limits to, for example, accuse the Chinese people of being responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.
- A new addition appears to create space for people who want to post about things like women not being allowed to serve in the military or men not being allowed to teach math because of their gender. Meta now allows content that advocates “gender-based restrictions on military, law enforcement, and education jobs. We also allow the same content based on sexual orientation, when the content is based on religious beliefs.”
- Another update delves deeper into what Meta allows in conversations about social exclusion. It now states that “people sometimes use sex- or gender-exclusive language when discussing access to spaces often limited by sex or gender, such as access to bathrooms, specific schools, specific military, law enforcement, or educational positions, and health care or support. Previously, this split was only available for discussions about limiting health and support groups to one gender.
- Meta's Hateful Conduct policy previously began by noting that hate speech “may promote offline violence.” That sentence, which had been in the policy since 2019, has been removed from the updated version released Tuesday. (In 2018, following reports from human rights groups, Meta admitted that its platform was used to incite violence against religious minorities in Myanmar.) The update does retain language at the bottom of the policy that prohibits content that “incites threatened violence or intimidation. .”
