Blitz Bureau
WASHINGTON: It wasn’t just factchecking that Meta scrapped from its platforms as it prepares for the second Trump administration, said a report by Associated Press.
The social media giant, it said, has also loosened its rules around hate speech and abuse – again following the lead of Elon Musk’s X – specifically when it comes to sexual orientation and gender identity as well as immigration status. According to the AP report, 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 the company will “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse,” citing “recent elections” as a catalyst.
For instance, Meta has added the following to its rules – called community standards – that users are asked to abide by: “We 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.’”
In other words, it is now permitted to call gay people mentally ill on Facebook, Threads and Instagram. Other slurs and what Meta calls “harmful stereotypes historically linked to intimidation” – such as Blackface and Holocaust denial – are still prohibited.
The Menlo Park, Californiabased company also removed a sentence from its “policy rationale” explaining why it bans certain hateful conduct. The now-deleted sentence said that hate speech “creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion, and in some cases may promote offline violence.”
“The policy change is a tactic to earn favor with the incoming administration while also reducing business costs related to content moderation,” said Ben Leiner, a lecturer at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business who studies political and technology trends.
This decision, he was quoted as saying by AP, “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.”
