NEW: I've obtained internal Meta docs with examples of posts now allowed under new hate speech rules. Examples include calling children "trannies," “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians," and “immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit” theintercept.com/2025/01/09/fac…
The loosened rules allow for overt statements of racial superiority, and unsurprisingly given the national moment, carve out particular latitude for hateful comments about transgender people and immigrants.
The document outlines the at times arbitrary boundaries Meta has drawn w/r/t hate speech. "Lesbians are so stupid" is cited as against the rules, while “Trans people are mentally ill” or “Gay people are sinners” are now marked as allowable.
Statements that one protected class is smarter than another are allowed—but only if posted with "support." The example given for this rule is “I just read a statistical study about Jewish people being smarter than Christians." Easy to imagine other nouns being swapped in here.
The document states that "dehumanizing" statements are still forbidden, but cites as examples of content moderators should "Allow" posts saying “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit," “Gays are freaks," and “Mexican immigrants are trash!”
It is also worth pointing out that it now appears to be, per these materials, official Meta policy that you can say "Italians are dickheads."
Do you work at Meta? Do you have information about this or other policies that you think the public should know? Please contact me via Signal—not from a work-provided device—at sambiddle.99
My main takeaway from all this is that it underscores 1. The inherently political nature of any content moderation and 2. The incoherence of Meta's censorship rules in particular.
In his post, Joel Kaplan wrote Meta has built "complex systems to manage content on our platforms, which are increasingly complicated for us to enforce." This is absolutely true, and these systems regularly suppress political speech. But this response does nothing to change that
Meta users will now be more able to slur and insult each other, but will still be unable to freely discuss thousands of blacklisted entities because they are deemed too "dangerous." theintercept.com/2021/10/12/fac…
And if the company were genuinely concerned about political/governmental pressure re: censorship, it would probably not employ an official representative of the Israeli government who internally requests the deletion of content that gov doesn't like theintercept.com/2024/10/21/ins…
A 2022 audit commissioned by Meta found the company was systematically violating the human rights of Palestinian users through its censorship apparatus. But these users have zero political capital, so the company does very little to address this. theintercept.com/2022/09/21/fac…
Ultimately, I think these new hate speech rules illustrate the extent to which the 'Community Standards' are less a system of principled values than a tool Meta can use to reposition itself in response to powerful outside pressures (political, governmental, cultural).
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