Mark Zuckerberg didn’t just disband Meta’s fact-checking team, he opened the door for hate speech directed toward women and the LGBTQ+ community.
Meta announced sweeping changes to its “hateful conduct” policy Tuesday, slashing multiple rules that might have protected women and minorities from hate-targeted speech.
While language was screened for hate speech in the past, thanks to Zuck, they can now exercise their rights to refer to women as “household objects, property, or objects in general,” per the updated policy details. They can also use their newfound freedom to refer to women as “whores” and “sluts” without repercussion in the new MAGA-friendly Meta, according to the doc.
More so, Zuck’s sweeping changes to the policy allow users to specifically target transgender people and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole. Now, users are free to comment regarding “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.’”
In other words, Zuck is giving rage-filled transphobic social media users an opportunity to attack the minority group in the name of free speech and debate.
And while Meta’s policy states that they don’t allow any attacks on protected characteristics such as race, disability, sex, and more, they do specifically allow users the freedom to refer to “transgender or nonbinary people as ‘it.’”
Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan, Meta’s president of global affairs, announced the rollout of changes Tuesday under the guise of “free expression.”
However, looking at a bigger picture of what’s going on, Zuckerberg may have outside factors influencing his decisions over his social media empire.
After all, Zuckerberg is going up against a nasty Federal Trade Commission antitrust lawsuit. Meta was sued in 2020 by the FTC for its acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram at what the commission says was an extremely high asking price—all to crush competitors.
And while Zuckerberg has notoriously gone head to head with Donald Trump, he could use the incoming president on his side if the billionaire wants to protect his social media kingdom.
This blatant bending of the knee became apparent when Zuckerberg started making appearances at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, and then later becoming one of, now many, tech billionaires to cough up seven figures toward Trump’s secretive inaugural fund.
Jeff Bezos is another example of belly turning in the name of protecting their precious jewels. The Amazon founder has been a Democratic supporter in the past, but given that the FTC has also sued Bezos’ empire for antitrust violations, he may have a reason to beg for Trump’s favor as well.
