LGBTQ people can be described as ‘mentally ill’ after Meta amends policy
Billions of social media users can now describe LGBTQ people as “mentally ill” and women as “property” under sweeping changes to Meta’s policy.
Billions of social media users will be permitted to describe LGBTQ people as “mentally ill” and women as “property” under sweeping changes to Meta’s hateful conduct policy.
The guidelines, which came into play effective immediately on Tuesday, still do not allow users on the likes of Facebook, Instagram or Threads to insult someone’s intellect or mental illness – unless such accusations are levelled at sexual or gender orientation.
“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’,” the revised company guidelines read.
Such comments would have previously been subject to removal under Meta’s policy.
Another clause ruling that users cannot compare women to “household objects or property” has also been removed.
American LGBTQ media advocacy group, GLAAD, swiftly denounced the changes.
“Without these necessary hate speech and other policies, Meta is giving the green light for people to target LGBTQ people, women, immigrants, and other marginalised groups with violence, vitriol, and dehumanising narratives,” President and CEO, Sarah Kate Ellis, said in a statement.
“With these changes, Meta is continuing to normalise anti-LGBTQ hatred for profit – at the expense of its users and true freedom of expression. Fact-checking and hate speech policies protect free speech.”
Chief executive of the UK’s biggest LGTBQ charity Stonewall, Simon Blake, warned that “online hate and disinformation damages how society views and treats marginalised groups, and undermines societal cohesion”.
“Meta’s approach puts politics above people when many are already concerned about the toxicity of online discourse, risking furthering division instead of fostering community,” Mr Blake told Sky News UK.
“This is a slippery slope and will undoubtedly have real world consequences at a time when minority rights, including LGBTQ+ rights, are already under threat.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced on Wednesday that the tech behemoth would replace its third-party fact checkers – first introduced in 2016 after the election of Donald Trump – with crowdsourced “community notes”, similar to those on Elon Musk’s X.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
“There’s been widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political. But there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there – drugs, terrorism, child exploitation.”
Mr Zuckerberg said those were “things that we take very seriously and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly”.
“So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content,” he said.
“But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just one per cent of posts, that is millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Mr Zuckerberg acknowledged that the new approach will mean “that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down”.
Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, President-elect Trump expressed satisfaction with the move, and when asked if he believed it was a response to his “threats” against Mr Zuckerberg, responded, “Probably, yeah.”
In August, Mr Trump claimed in a book that Mr Zuckerberg had interfered in the 2020 election and that he would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he attempted to interfere in 2024.
He later softened his position, telling a podcast in October that he liked the Meta CEO “much better now” that he was “staying out of the election”, adding that Mr Zuckerberg had called him after he was shot in July “which was nice”.
Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, told Fox News on Tuesday that it was a “great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favour of free expression”.
“We have a new administration coming in that is far from pressuring companies to censor and (is more) a huge supporter of free expression,” Mr Kaplan said.
“It gets us back to the values that Mark founded the company on.”
– with Frank Chung
Originally published as LGBTQ people can be described as ‘mentally ill’ after Meta amends policy
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