Meta Now Lets Users Say Gay and Trans People Have 'Mental Illness'

 

 By Kate Knibbs-WIRED

 

Meta announced a series of major updates to its content moderation policies today, including that it’s “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.

Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss told WIRED these restrictions will be loosened globally. When asked whether the company will adopt different policies in countries with strict regulations governing hate speech, Chambliss pointed to Meta's current guidelines for addressing local laws.

Other significant changes made to Meta’s Hateful Conduct policy Tuesday include:

• Removing language prohibiting content targeting people based on the basis of their “protected characteristics,” which include race, ethnicity, and gender identity, when they are combined with “claims that they have or spread the coronavirus.” Without this provision, it may now be within bounds to accuse, for example, Chinese people of bearing responsibility for the Covid-19 pandemic.
• A new addition appears to carve out room for people who want to post about how, for example, women shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the military or men shouldn’t be allowed to teach math because of their gender. Meta now permits content that argues for "gender-based limitations of military, law enforcement, and teaching jobs. We also allow the same content based on sexual orientation, when the content is based on religious beliefs.”
• Another update elaborates on what Meta permits 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 teaching roles, and health or support groups." Previously, this carve-out was only available for discussions about keeping health and support groups limited to one gender.
• Meta’s Hateful Conduct policy previously opened by noting that hateful speech may “promote offline violence.” That sentence, which had been present in the policy since 2019, has been removed from the updated version released Tuesday. (In 2018, following reports from human rights groups, Meta has admitted that its platform was used to incite violence against religious minorities in Myanmar.) The update does preserve language towards the bottom of the policy prohibiting content that could “incite imminent violence or intimidation.”

The updates similarly preserve a number of older restrictions that Meta has had in place for years. The current version of the policy maintains prohibitions on Holocaust denials, Blackface, insinuations about Jewish people controlling the media. It also adds a specific ban against comparing Black people to “farm equipment.”

Meta also preserved its previous list of what it calls protected characteristics, which include race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, and serious disease, as well as its policy about “protecting migrants, immigrants, and asylum-seekers” from what it characterizes as “Tier 1” or “most severe” attacks, such as content targeting people or groups of people based on their protected characteristics or immigration status.

In keeping with the previous version, Meta continues to ban calling immigrants, as well as people in “protected characteristic” groups, insects, animals, pathogens, or “other sub-human life forms” as well as alleging that they are criminals or immoral. It appears that some of the most xenophobic remarks made by high-profile figures—like President Trump’s 2023 statement about undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country”—may still violate Meta’s policies if posted to its platforms. Meta did not respond to WIRED’s question on whether that specific statement would be permitted.