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.

  • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • Kalysta@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

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

      • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        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.