The Facebook company Meta has updated its moderation guidelines. Users are now allowed to insult people based on their sexuality.
The US tech company Meta allows its users to describe people as “mentally ill” based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. This is according to the new moderation guidelines that the company published on Tuesday.
Facebook Group partially relaxes guidelines
NBC News reports that while Meta is maintaining previous restrictions on insults about people's intellect or mental state on its Instagram, Facebook and Threads platforms, it is relaxing those based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
“Given the political and religious discourse surrounding transgenderism and homosexuality, and the general, non-serious use of words like 'weird,' we allow claims of mental illness or abnormality when they are based on gender or sexual orientation,” it says the revised company guidelines.
LGBTQ* organization strongly condemns new guidelines
The company also removed policies that prohibited users from referring to trans or non-binary people as “it.” According to reports from NBC News, Meta has also eliminated a number of rules that prohibit insults based on race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, class, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and serious medical conditions.
The president of the organization “GLAAD” (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), Sarah Kate Ellis, is outraged by the decision: “Without these necessary hate speech and other guidelines, Meta gives people the green light, LGBTQ people, women, “To attack immigrants and other marginalized groups with violence, hatred and dehumanizing narratives,” she told NBC News.
She added: “With these changes, Meta continues to normalize anti-LGBTQ hate for its own profit – at the expense of its users and true freedom of expression. Fact-checking and hate speech measures protect freedom of expression.”
Meta abolishes fact checking
The US company only announced on Tuesday (January 7) that it would end its fact-checking program in the USA. The Facebook founder explained in a video that the previous fact-checking program would be replaced by a community-driven system.
The approach is similar to the guidelines of Elon Musk's social media platform “X” (formerly Twitter), where users can add context to a post, photo or video, explained Zuckerberg. The Meta boss described the decision as a “cultural turning point”.
US President-elect Donald Trump welcomed the company's move. “Honestly, I think Meta and Facebook have evolved a lot,” Trump said at a news conference. He also suggested that Zuckerberg's decision to relax moderation may have been due to his previous threats.
