Facebook’s parent company Meta has announced a series of sweeping changes in its content moderation policies, including doing away with professional fact-checking and restrictions on controversial remarks about “topics like immigration, gender identity and gender”. Meta’s newly-appointed chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan reasoned that it was not fair that things could be said on “TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”
“Meta’s platforms are built to be places where people can express themselves freely. That can be messy. On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display. But that’s free expression,” Kaplan wrote in a blog post outlining the changes.
The blog post accompanied a video statement by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who described the company’s current rules in these areas as “just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
With the announcement, Meta also made a series of updates across its “Community Guidelines’ which outline what kinds of content are prohibited on its platforms, including Instagram, Threads, and Facebook.
What New Policy Say?
Meta now allows users to call women as “household objects or property”, “black people as farm equipment” and “transgender or non-binary people as ‘it,” according to a section of the policy prohibiting such speech that was crossed out.
A new section of the policy noted that Meta now 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”.”