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.

      • 800XL@lemmy.world
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        Is it? My bad, it definitely was not intended to be a homophobic comment. I appreciate you letting me know. In my experience, the religious and conservetives who spoke with the most vitriol towards the lgbtq community were in fact closeted and ended up coming out after being caught.

    • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
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      It’s easy to say this when you’re from a younger generation who uses more savvy platforms, but some people never got social media literate past Facebook. To them it’s just somewhere they log in to sometimes to see pictures of their new nephew in British Columbia or to sell an old bike on marketplace, or other really casual use. Maybe they look through their news feed sometimes and laugh at a meme or whatever. They really have no concept of what they are going to be fed and what fake news is even. They’re not ignorant, they just live most of their life away from a screen. And they’re not all older people. I have plenty of friends from church younger than me who have a Facebook that they update maybe once a year with a picture of their kids on Halloween and that’s it, they never do anything else with it. Some people genuinely have no concept of all the evil that’s being wrought on these platforms.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      I need to, because family refuses to use anything else for chat. Or at least with me, as my younger brother likely is an unironic nazi.

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    I’ve always seen people say and post this. The fact checking was selectively enforced. Better to have none than a half assed attempt

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    Reminder to get off Facebook and Instagram

    This isn’t the first time they’ve pulled stuff like this nor will it be the last

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      Facebook has about 3 billion users across the globe. That’s just 500 million short of half the human population of the planet. At its height Twitter was around 360 million. And it’s user base has only shrunk by 30 million or so since the douche bag took it over.

      Facebook, on the other hand, has dug its hooks into everyone’s personal lives to a point at which getting them to ditch Facebook would be like telling everyone to basically ditch their friends and family. No one is going to do that.

      Twitter was an add-on. It was an extra. You could use it or not, nobody cared. It hadn’t built a large enough user base to be so integral to people’s social lives. TikTok, in about half the time twitter has existed, has basically eclipsed it in terms of monthly active users.

      We have to accept this fact, Facebook has become an institution. And it should scare literally everyone that such a huge and powerful platform is owned by one single person with no real oversight whatsoever. That is why he was able to unilaterally decide to first censor Facebook at the beginning of the election and now uncensor it once an oligarch friendly president has been elected.

      Everyone’s so focused on DElon Husk’s role in getting Trump elected, but all Zuckerberg needed to do was shut down the discourse on his platform so that the news couldn’t flow. And now he’s adopting the policies of Xwitter in an effort to win some favoritism from the incoming administration.

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        I ditched facebook. Just means my friends and family have to call me. And if they don’t, fuck em.

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          There is none currently. You’re free to continue to advocate dropping Meta products, but don’t hold your breath. Ideally we would have some kind of government intervention to break up the monopoly that is Meta or some form of regulation to reign in their behavior, but none of our politicians care to bother and unfortunately, with the party coming into power in our government, there’s little hope any kind of regulation on any monopolistic corporations. With our last election the American people have chosen to package themselves up and give themselves over to the corporate overlords.

    • Squorlple@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Businesses need to bring back email newsletters. And whatever celebrities or whatnot you care about need to too. The only reason I signed back up for either of those sites was to follow a local business for updates/sales/etc.

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukOP
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      Reminder to get off Facebook and Instagram

      Most of us are already out or lurking because of family or some specific group they can’t do without.

      The trick will be getting those people off the platform so we can cut all cords.

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        Well you piqued my interest, where can i find these trans liturgy you speak of ? In a trans church? Or should i go to a woke cathedral? But seriously, what a pityfull comment you made. You could at least try to explain what you mean by false dichotomie before screaming about whatever strawman your comment is about. When did “trans activism” declared somebody irredeemably evil? (And did they deserved it?) And why are you talking about souls? Is this your way of understanding gender dysphoria?

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            Jk rowling is really not a good example of “unfair” accusations she literally denied that trans people where targeted by nazi

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              I think JK Rowling is an example of a person who should’ve stayed the fuck out of Twitter. There might be some debate on what kind of a person she was before starting to engage people in Twitter, but I don’t think there’s any doubt that it made her worse in every possible way.

              That she has been unable to let it go is the same kind of tragedy as when somebody succumbs to a narcotic and thus becomes a destructive asshole. Was the drug the reason for that individual to become an asshole or was he an asshole in soul and the drug just brought it to the surface?

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            People deem JK evil because she’s a generally terrible, hateful person. On the other hand, religion deems an entire group of people as evil regardless of what they’ve done in their life. A woman likes a woman? Straight to hell according to them. They could cure cancer and still straight to hell (which is where JK stands with trans people)

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              And don’t forget before gay marriage was legalized, they stated that anyone who married outside their race was going straight to hell.

              The religious “right” makes up a new enemy every 30-40 years when the group they were targeting gets legally recognized civil rights.

              Trans people will get full rights as well. It’s just gonna take a couple decades and us fighting like hell. JK rowling is on the wrong side of history and will be viewed as such in a few decades. Shame she wasted her legacy

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        What a wild comparison. One is based off scientific facts and one is purely based on the supernatural. Literal opposites

        Are you saying transactivism declares some people evil? How is that activism different from all other queer activism and does that also declare people evil? Is the belief in a soul part of any of that? Am I missing your point?

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    Oh yeah sure, THIS is what you people should be focusing on. Not on how to win voters for the next elections by NOT focusing on the same shit the electorate already told you they didn’t care about, noOOooo.

    Instead let’s just ignore what we didn’t learn from them, and double down! After all, the proles are too stupid to know better than an echo chamber!

    • Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
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      Next election? Are these the actions of a regime who thinks they’ll have to be reelected to stay in power?

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        Now a democratic elected government is a regime just because its not your party?

        go outside and touch some grass, kid

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      Trump campaign fucking smashed it. They live in current age and played us all.

      But how much did we hear about Gaza and Israel? That’s all sorted now, yeah? It makes me fucking sick how they used a genocide to turn us against their opponent when they themselves are going to be worse in every measurable way possible.

      I hate how gullible people have gotten.

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    I stopped letting Meta take my attention once they started making my feed fill itself with “reccomended” “you might like” pages and profiles that I at no point ever clicked on or searched for.

    before, my feed was exclusively my friends content, and pages I followed.

    now, they fill the gaps with evangelicals, gambling, and idiots posting chinese and russian war propaganda.

    yup, get the fuck out. im done.

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      Oh it’s a complete ghost town. Absolutely useless as actual social media. I suppose you could try starring/favoriting all your friends lol…

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      My entire feed is just nonsense now. Last year a guy I knew from my Warcraft days had cancer while a relative in Canada had a baby.

      They both posted these things on Facebook.

      What Facebook showed me was constant spam, so now I just see chess puzzle channels from India, street cooking videos from places with no hygiene laws, magic eye pictures and retro games. I’ve never asked it for any of these things, yet some algorithm detected I paused for a millisecond while scrolling past them so now that’s all I get. Fuck the people I know, right?

      It used to be useful for exactly one thing and it can’t even do that any more. The only way you can actually see a proper feed without spam is to go into a person/group’s profile directly.

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        I decided I was going to discontinue using Meta products except to put out an occasional Instagram photo, pushed to Facebook, to tell…people I don’t even talk to anymore, and for good reason…that I was alive and a sight of what I was doing. I discontinued my old Facebook profile and made a new one only for this purpose.

        Because Facebook kind of sees me as a new user, I’m able to see content I wasn’t able to before. And fuck, that place feels like some weird scam and bot flea market.

        I hope it’s soon to die but who knows if it’ll transform into some unmasked arm of the government for surveillance.

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        I use the website / app for exactly one purpose, marketplace. buy and sell shit.

        I still have messenger for work purposes, as well as some family and friends. but the “Feed”. the status updates, Fuck no. burn it all.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    Your response doesn’t address my initial point. Again, don’t make that false equivalence.

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    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.

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      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.

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

    • GrymEdm@lemmy.world
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      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.