Meta today announced a series of major updates to its content moderation policies, including “removing” restrictions on speech on “topics such as immigration, gender identity, and gender” that the company describes as frequent topics of speech and debate. political. “It is not right that things can be said on television or on the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” Meta’s newly appointed director of global affairs, Joel Kaplan, wrote in a statement. blog post describing 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 the dominant discourse.”
Along with this announcement, the company made a series of updates to its Community Standards, a broad set of rules that outline what types of content are prohibited on Meta platforms, including Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. Some of the most surprising changes were made to Meta”hateful behavior”, which covers debates 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 around transgenderism and homosexuality and the common and unserious use of words as ‘weird’.”
In other words, Meta now appears to allow users to accuse transgender or homosexual people of having mental illness because of their gender expression and sexual orientation. The company did not respond to requests for clarification about the policy.
Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss told WIRED that these restrictions will be relaxed globally. When asked if the company would adopt different policies in countries with strict regulations governing hate speech, Chambliss pointed to current Meta guidelines to address local laws.
Other significant changes made Tuesday to Meta’s hateful conduct policy include:
- Remove language that prohibits content directed at people based on their “protected characteristics,” including race, ethnicity and gender identity, when combined with “claims that they have or spread coronavirus.” Without this provision, it may now be within limits to accuse, for example, the Chinese people of being responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.
- A new addition appears to leave room for people who want to post about how, for example, women should not be allowed to serve in the military or men should not be allowed to teach math because of their gender. Meta now allows content that advocates for “gender-based limitations on military, police, and teaching jobs. We also allow the same content based on sexual orientation, when the content is based on religious beliefs.”
- Another update details what Meta enables 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, police, or teaching functions, and health services.” health or support.” “Previously, this exclusion was only available for discussions about keeping health and support groups limited to one gender.
- Meta’s hate conduct policy previously began by noting that hate speech can “promote offline violence.” That phrase, which had been present in the policy since 2019, was removed from the updated version published Tuesday. (In 2018, following reports from human rights groups, Meta has accepted that his 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.”