Key points
- Company’s new guidelines prohibit insults about someone’s intellect or mental illness
- Include a caveat for accusing LGBTQ people of being mentally ill
ISLAMABAD: Meta’s new guidelines will allow its users to accuse people of being mentally ill based on their sexuality or gender identity, among broader changes it made to its moderation policies and practices.
According to NBC News, the company’s new guidelines prohibit insults about someone’s intellect or mental illness on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, as have previous iterations. However, the latest guidelines now include a caveat for accusing LGBTQ people of being mentally ill because they are gay or transgender.
Revised guidelines
“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 and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,’” the revised company guidelines read.
Read Also: Afghan Activists Ask England Not to Play Cricket with Afghan Men’s Team for Gender Discrimination
The new guidelines around hate speech are part of Meta’s broader major changes regarding how it moderates online speech on its platforms. On Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it will replace its fact-checking program, which has relied on trusted organizational partners, with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes. X’s system allows users to submit suggested “notes” on other people’s content, and then certain users vote on whether or not the notes are publicly displayed. Zuckerberg cited “recent elections” and “a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.”
List of changes
The long list of changes to the new hate speech guidelines include removing rules that forbid insults about a person’s appearance based on race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease. Meta also scrapped policies that prohibited expressions of hate against a person or a group on the basis of their protected class and that banned users from referring to transgender or nonbinary people as “it.”
GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy group, denounced the changes, according to NBC News.
