Washington, Jan 10: It wasn’t just fact-checking that Meta scrapped from its platforms as it prepares for the second Trump administration. The social media giant has also loosened its rules around hate speech and abuse â again following the lead of Elon Musk’s X â specifically when it comes to sexual orientation and gender identity as well as immigration status.The changes are worrying advocates for vulnerable groups, who say Meta’s decision to scale back content moderation could lead to real-word harms.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company will âremove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse,” citing ârecent electionsâ as a catalyst.
For instance, Meta has added the following to its rules â called community standards â that users are asked to abide by:
âWe 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.’â In other words, it is now permitted to call gay people mentally ill on Facebook, Threads and Instagram. Other slurs and what Meta calls âharmful stereotypes historically linked to intimidationâ â such as Blackface and Holocaust denial â are still prohibited.
The Menlo Park, California-based company also removed a sentence from its âpolicy rationaleâ explaining why it bans certain hateful conduct. The now-deleted sentence said that hate speech âcreates an environment of intimidation and exclusion, and in some cases may promote offline violence.â
The policy change is a tactic to earn favour with the incoming administration while also reducing business costs related to content moderation,â said Ben Leiner, a lecturer at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business who studies political and technology trends. âThis decision will lead to real-world harm, not only in the United States where there has been an uptick in hate speech and disinformation on social media platforms, but also abroad where disinformation on Facebook has accelerated ethnic conflict in places like Myanmar.â
Meta, in fact, acknowledged in 2018 that it didn’t do enough to prevent its platform from being used to âincite offline violenceâ in Myanmar, fueling communal hatred and violence against the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority.