Meta is now granting its users new freedom to post a wide array of derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities, training materials obtained by The Intercept reveal.
Examples of newly permissible speech on Facebook and Instagram highlighted in the training materials include:
“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”
“Gays are freaks.”
“Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl).”
The changes are part of a broader policy shift that includes the suspension of the company’s fact-checking program. The goal, Meta said Tuesday, is to “allow more speech by lifting restrictions.”
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While Kaplan and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have couched the changes as a way to allow users to engage more freely in ideological dissent and political debate, the previously unreported policy materials reviewed by The Intercept illustrate the extent to which purely insulting and dehumanizing rhetoric is now accepted.
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Kate Klonick, a content moderation policy expert who spoke to The Intercept, contests Meta’s framing that the new rules as less politicized, given the latitude they provide to attack conservative bogeymen.
“Drawing lines around content moderation was always a political enterprise,” said Klonick, an associate professor of law at St. John’s University and scholar of content moderation policy. “To pretend these new rules are any more ‘neutral’ than the old rules is a farce and a lie.”
She sees the shifts announced by Kaplan — a former White House deputy chief of staff under George W. Bush and Zuckerberg’s longtime liaison to the American right — as “the open political capture of Facebook, particularly because the changes are pandering to a particular party.”
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Another policy shift: “Referring to the target as genitalia or anus are now considered non-violating and are allowed.” As an example of what is now permissible, Facebook offers up: “Italians are dickheads.”
While many of the examples and underlying policies seem muddled, the document shows clarity around allowing disparaging remarks about transgender people, including children. Noting that “‘Tranny’ is no longer a designated slur and is now non-violating,” the materials provide three examples of speech that should no longer be removed: “Trannies are a problem,” “Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl),” and “Get these trannies out of my school (beneath photo of high school students).”
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According to Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Meta’s hate speech protections have historically been well-intentioned, however deeply flawed in practice. “While this has often resulted in over-moderation that I and many others have criticized, these examples demonstrate that Meta’s policy changes are political in nature and not intended to simply allow more freedom of expression,” York said.
Meta has faced international scrutiny for its approach to hate speech, most notably after role that hate speech and other dehumanizing language on Facebook played in fomenting genocide in Myanmar. Following criticism of its mishandling of Myanmar, where the United Nations found Facebook had played a “determining role” in the slaughter of over 650,000 Rohingya Muslims, the company spent years touting its investment in preventing the spread of similar rhetoric in the future.
“The reason many of these lines were drawn where they were is because hate speech often doesn’t stay speech, it turns into real world conduct,” said Klonick, the content moderation scholar.
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