Meta Now Lets Users Say Women Are "Household Objects", Trans People Have "Mental Illness"

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"."

Other changes in Meta's Hateful Conduct policy include removing language prohibiting content targeting people based on the basis of their "protected characteristics"-- which include race, ethnicity, and gender identity--with claims that they have or spread the novel coronavirus. Without this provision, now users can associate the Covid-19 pandemic with Chinese people.

Meta also brought in a provision to allow users to argue for gender-based limitations in military, law enforcement, and teaching jobs. "We also allow the same content based on sexual orientation, when the content is based on religious beliefs," the guidelines said. This will mean that now users will be allowed to say women shouldn't be allowed to serve in the military or men shouldn't be allowed to teach English.

Meta said that it recognises that people sometimes share content that includes slurs or someone else's hate speech in order to condemn the speech or report on it.

Elaborating on what will now be permitted in conversations about social exclusion, Meta said, "People use sex- or gender-exclusive language when discussing access to spaces often limited by sex or gender, such as access to bathrooms, specific schools, specific military, law enforcement, or teaching roles, and health or support groups. Other times, they call for exclusion or use insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality. Finally, sometimes people curse at a gender in the context of a romantic break-up."

Since 2019, Meta's Hateful Conduct policy reportedly opened by noting that hateful speech may "promote offline violence." That sentence has now been removed from the updated version released on Tuesday.