GLAAD responded after Meta—which owns Instagram and Facebook—removed and adapted several sections of its Hateful Conduct Policy, rolling back safety guardrails for LGBTQ+ people, people of color, women, immigrants and other protected groups.
Meta is also eliminating fact-checking. Both moves are taking place days before Donald Trump assumes the presidency for a second term.
“Today’s sweeping and extreme policy changes represent a wholesale abandonment of the norms and best practices of content moderation. The new language of Meta’s Community Standards includes numerous changes that will result in Instagram, Facebook, and Threads becoming unsafe landscapes filled with dangerous hate speech, violence, harassment, and misinformation,” GLAAD said in a statement emailed to Windy City Times.
GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said that CEO Mark “Zuckerberg’s removal of fact-checking programs and industry-standard hate speech policies make Meta’s platforms unsafe places for users and advertisers alike. Without these necessary hate speech and other policies, Meta is giving the green light for people to target LGBTQ people, women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups with violence, vitriol, and dehumanizing narratives. With these changes, Meta is continuing to normalize anti-LGBTQ hatred for profit—at the expense of its users and true freedom of expression. Fact-checking and hate speech policies protect free speech.”
In a video, Zuckerberg said the company’s content moderation approach resulted too often in “censorship,” according to NPR. He added that “the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Meta set up an extensive partnership with fact checkers after the 2016 presidential election, during which Russia spread false claims on Facebook and other online platforms. In recent years, fact checkers and content-moderation programs have been targeted by GOP-led Congressional probes and legal challenges.