Meta Now Lets Users Say Gay and Trans People Have ‘Mental Illness’
www.wired.com
Meta rolled out a number of changes to its “Hateful Conduct” policy Tuesday as part of a sweeping overhaul of its approach toward content moderation.

Meta announced a series of major updates to its content moderation policies today, including ending its fact-checking partnerships and “getting rid” of restrictions on speech about “topics like immigration, gender identity and gender” that the company describes as frequent subjects of political discourse and debate. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, 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 “just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

In tandem with this announcement, the company made a number of updates across its Community Guidelines, an extensive set of rules that outline what kinds of content are prohibited on Meta’s platforms, including Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. Some of the most striking changes were made to Meta’s “Hateful Conduct” policy, which covers discussions on immigration and gender.

In a notable shift, the company now says it allows “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.’”

In other words, Meta now appears to permit 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.

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    43·
    21 hours ago

    Comparing Facebook to a Nazi bar is ridiculous.

    not really considering meta has several nazis on their board.

    • ArchRecord@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      17 hours ago

      Who exactly? At present I’m wholly unaware of anybody on the FB board who I’d call a Nazi.

      I’m genuinely asking by the way, that isn’t meant to be some kind of rebuttal.

      However, I would again note the fact that any current board members were likely not on the board when many Facebook users joined, (and the lock-in they experience keeps them there) and even if they were, what kind of person is ever aware of individual corporate board members?

      Extrapolating that back out to your Nazi bar analogy, that would be like if you went into a bar, the people in there were your friends and family, the workers at the front were normal people, but the person who owned the LLC behind the bar was a Nazi. In that case, to “be astonished at the fascist rhetoric of the Nazi bar” isn’t exactly unexpected!