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.

  • capital@lemmy.world
    214·
    17 hours ago

    I get the sense a bunch of y’all weren’t around for the early internet.

    Lots of dumb people out there and they’re doing to say all kinds of deranged shit. Grow a pair and move on.

    • dx1@lemmy.world
      111·
      17 hours ago

      I’ve been on the Web since mid 90s. It is 100x worse now, due to systemic promotion of fascists.

    • Cataphract@lemmy.ml
      41·
      16 hours ago

      Real “Old Man on the Porch” vibes coming from this one. I was around for the early internet, you’re completely losing touch with society and reality if you think it’s the same.

      Most people at that time didn’t get their news and gossip from a device in their hand. It was called a newspaper, education, or listening to your peers. Internet extremists were still considered fringe or whacko’s and you had to hunt them down to learn more, they weren’t blasted by an algorithm on a front loading page for you.

      People’s businesses and way of life weren’t determined by their access to internet and the corporations didn’t have such a stranglehold across the economical board when it came to online. The hero worship of those that control the companies wasn’t at such an all time high, but considered a weird cult.

      I’m not even going to go into the difference a child has on the internet today versus what a kid going through the 90’s was like, there’s just no comparison to what’s going on now. Yeah we had obscure boards, messengers, and silly videos on multiple sites…that’s seriously nothing compared to how mainstream everything has become.

    • GrymEdm@lemmy.world
      1·
      15 hours ago

      I’ve been online since the days of dial-up, and even places like 4chan had containment boards specifically set aside for jackasses. If you went to one of those you knew what you were getting into. Not that you wouldn’t find it on other boards, but the content elsewhere was mostly memes, life stories, cooking, vidya, shock content and so on. You could always find stupidity and hatred, but it’s way more common now in terms of # of people posting. With the removal of moderation Facebook is set to become the new /pol/ but sitewide.