Meta Now Lets Users Say Gay and Trans People Have ‘Mental Illness’

meta announcement Today is a series of major updates to its content moderation policy, including its termination Fact-checking partnership and “getting rid” of restrictions on speech about “issues like immigration, gender identity and gender” that the company describes as frequent topics of political discourse and debate. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or on the floor of Congress, but not on our platform,” said Mater’s newly-appointed chief global affairs officer. Joel Kaplan wrote in one Blog post Outline of change.

In an accompanying video, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the company’s current rules in this regard as “out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

In conjunction with the announcement, the company made several updates across its Community Guidelines, a comprehensive set of rules that outline what types of content are prohibited on Meta’s platforms, including Instagram, Threads and Facebook. Some of the most interesting changes have been made to the mater “hateful behavior” policy, which discusses immigration and gender.

In a significant change, the agency now says it allows allegations of mental illness or abnormality based on gender or sexual orientation, political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality, and the general non-serious use of words like ‘queer’.

In other words, Meta now allows 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.

Metro spokesman Cory Chambliss told Wired that those restrictions will be relaxed worldwide. When asked if the company would adopt different policies in countries with stricter regulations governing hate speech, Chambliss indicated Met’s current guidance on addressing local legislation.

Other notable changes made to Meta’s hateful conduct policy on Tuesday include:

• Removing language banning content targeting people based on their “protected characteristics,” which include race, ethnicity and gender identity, when they claim to “have or spread the coronavirus.” Without this provision, it may now be within the scope of blaming, for example, the Chinese people for the Covid-19 pandemic.
• A new addition appears to make room for people who want to post, for example, how women shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the military or men shouldn’t be allowed to teach math because of their gender. Meta now allows content that “argues for gender-based restrictions on military, law enforcement and educational jobs. We allow the same content based on sexual orientation, when content is based on religious beliefs.”
• Another update elaborates on what meta allows in conversations about social exclusion. It now states that “people sometimes use sex- or gender-exclusive language when discussing access to spaces often restricted by sex or gender, such as access to bathrooms, certain schools, certain military, law enforcement, or teaching roles, and health or support. group.” Previously, this carve-out was only available to discuss health and support groups restricted to one gender.
• Meta’s hateful behavior policy previously opened up that hate speech “may promote offline violence.” That sentence, which had been present in the policy since 2019, was removed from the updated version released Tuesday. (In 2018, following reports from human rights groups, there is meta admission That its platform was used to incite violence against religious minorities In Myanmar.) The update preserves language at the bottom of the policy prohibiting content that “may suggest imminent violence or intimidation.”