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Meta announced a series of major updates to its content moderation policies today, including “getting rid” of restrictions on speech on “issues such as immigration, gender identity and gender” that the company describes as frequent subjects of political discourse and debate. “It’s not fair that things can be said on TV or on the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” the new head of Meta’s global business. Joel Kaplan he 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 “just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
In tandem with this announcement, the company made a number of updates to its Community Guidelines, a broad set of rules that outline what types of content are prohibited on Meta’s platforms, including Instagram, Threads and Facebook. Some of the most impressive changes have been made to Meta”Heinous conduct” politics, covering discussions on immigration and gender.
In a notable change, the company now says it allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given the political and religious discourse on transgenderism and homosexuality and common usage not serious about words like “strange”.
In other words, Meta now appears to allow users to accuse transgender or gay 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 loosened globally. When asked if the company would adopt different policies in countries with strict regulations governing hate speech, Chambliss pointed to Meta’s current guidelines to address local laws.
Other significant changes made to the Hateful Behavior Tuesday policy include:
- Removing language that prohibits content targeting people based on their “protected characteristics,” which include race, ethnicity, and gender identity, when combined with “claims that they have or spread the coronavirus.” Without this provision, it may now be within limits to accuse, for example, the Chinese of their responsibility for the Covid-19 pandemic.
- A new addition seems to dig a space for people who want to post how, for example, women should not be allowed to serve in the army or men should not be allowed to teach mathematics because of their gender. Meta now allows content that supports “gender-based limitations of military, law enforcement and teaching employment. We also allow the same content based on sexual orientation, when the content is based on religious beliefs.”
- Another update elaborates on what Meta allows in conversations about social exclusion. Now he says 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 law, or teaching role, and health or support.” Previously, this carve-out was only available for discussions about maintaining health and support groups limited to one gender.
- Meta’s Hateful Conduct policy was opened earlier, noting that hateful speech can “promote offline violence.” This sentence, which was present in the policy since 2019, was removed from the updated version released on Tuesday. (In 2018, following reports from human rights groups, Meta has admitted whose platform was used to incite violence against religious minorities in Myanmar.) The update preserves language toward the bottom of the policy that prohibits content that could “incite imminent violence or intimidation.”
