Meta reveals the shocking "hateful speech" it now finds totally acceptable
Warning: Offensive and potentially upsetting content.
Meta users can now compare women to household objects if they wish or refer to transgender people as "it" thanks to a potentially disturbing update to its rules on "hateful speech".
The social network giant formerly known as Facebook announced its new policy as part of free speech drive launched just in time for the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
Having spent the past year undergoing a rebrand that closely resembles a mid-life crisis (kudos to anyone with the cringe control to sit through his duet with T-Pain), Zuck appeared on Instagram wearing a $900,000 Greubel Forsey watch to announce his intention to "get back to our roots around free expression".
He described the election of Trump as a move "towards, once again, prioritizing speech", criticising governments and legacy media for pushing to "censor more and more" due to motives that are "clearly political".
Zuck also announced a bonfire of censorship rules and the establishment of X-style Community Notes. The Meta moderation team will be moved from California to Texas in order to "do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams" (although it could be argued that he risks swapping one kind of partisanship for another).
"We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts," he said.
You can read the full transcript of Zuck's talk later in this article and watch him singing with T-Pain in the vid below - if you dare.
What offensive and hateful language is now allowed on Meta?
Meta started by redefining hateful speech as "hateful conduct", setting out all the slurs and insults Mark Zuckerberg is now absolutely happy to have used on his platform.
Its change log shows that the social media titan has removed its ban on "hate speech attacks", instead announcing a prohibition on "dehumanising speech," including "allegations of serious immorality or criminality, and slurs."
This means it will remove any words or phrases that have been "used to attack, intimidate, or exclude specific groups, and that are often linked with offline violence", such as notorious comparisons between ethnic groups and animals that are thankfully considered totally unacceptable by most people.
However, users are now able to say that people who have protected characteristics have "bad hygiene". They can also speculate about fellow Metazens having cancer or a sexually transmitted disease.
Additionally, Meta said it's now cool to call people “thieves" and “bank robbers" or say: “All [protected characteristic or quasi-protected characteristic] are criminals.”
But that's not all.
"We do allow 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'."
Which means Meta is comfortable with its users calling gay people mentally ill. Not the best recipe for a healthy conversation.
Have you spotted anything shocking on Meta? Get in touch with jasper@machine.news to let us know.
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta free speech Instagram announcement transcript
"Hey everyone. I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today, but a lot has happened over the last several years.
"There's been widespread debate about the potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts.
"That's millions of people, and we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech. So, we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here's what we're going to do.
"First, we're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the US. After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US. So, over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.
"Second, we're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far. So, I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
"Third, we're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now, we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, and for lower-severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't. So, by dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.
"Fourth, we're bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts, but it feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive. Fifth, we're going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.
"Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They're going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.
"By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I'm excited to take it. It'll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems. They're never going to be perfect. There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove. But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice. I'm looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there, and more to come soon."
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