Alongside the announcement that Meta was ending its relationship with independent fact-checkers, the social media company outlined new “hateful conduct” policies. Those policies explicitly permit users to call LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill” or “abnormal” without violating platform rules.
According to Poynter.org, these changes are part of a larger shift in how Meta plans to moderate content and speech on its platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. But these carve-outs could also allow the spread of misinformation.
Leading medical experts do not consider being gay or transgender to be a mental illness, and we’ve fact-checked claims to the contrary.
For people who identify as transgender, their sex — the biological category they were assigned at birth — does not match their gender identity, which is someone’s internal sense of being a man, woman, or nonbinary gender.
Here’s what Meta changed, and what medical experts say about LGBTQ+ people and mental health.
New Meta policy lets users call LGBTQ+ people ‘mentally ill’
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Jan. 7 video, “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.”
Meta has long had “Community Standards” for the content allowed on its platforms. Meta can take down posts that violate those standards.
When it updated its standards on “hateful conduct” on Jan. 7 to narrow what speech violated its policies, Meta specified that insults about “mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness,” are not allowed. That’s similar to the previous rules.
But it added a new exception: “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.”
The Anti-Defamation League, a nongovernmental organization that tracks online extremism, says the term transgenderism “has been co-opted by anti-trans activists to characterize being transgender as an ideology rather than an innate identity.”
In its updated “policy rationale,” Meta wrote that although people may use insulting language or call for exclusion when discussing topics such as transgender rights or homosexuality, “Our policies are designed to allow room for these types of speech.”
With information from Poynter.org
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