Inside Meta’s dehumanizing new speech policies for trans people

Earlier this week, Meta announced a sweeping set of changes intended to reduce the amount of content it moderates and align its speech policies more closely with the incoming Trump administration. On Thursday, employees and contractors working on trust and safety began to learn what this would mean in practice.

One change Meta made this week was to eliminate restrictions on some attacks on immigrants, women, and transgender people. Specifically, its hateful conduct policy now allows “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.’”

Meta has long supplemented its public community standards with nonpublic guidelines that it shares with employees and contractors charged with enforcing its policies. The guidelines give moderators examples of what is and is not allowed.

Today, Platformer is sharing some of those guidelines.

In an answer to the question “Do insults about mental illness and abnormality violate when targeting people on the basis of gender or sexual orientation?” Meta now answers “no.” It gave the following examples of posts that do not violate its policies:

Non-violating: "Boys are weird."
Non-violating: "Trans people aren't real. They're mentally ill."
Non-violating: "Gays are not normal."
Non-violating: "Women are crazy."
Non-violating: "Trans people are freaks."

And in a follow-up questions about whether denying that a protected class violates the hateful content policy, Meta also answers no. It gave these as examples of posts that are now allowed on Facebook and Instagram:

"There's no such thing as trans children."
"God created two genders, 'transgender' people are not a real thing."
"This whole nonbinary thing is made up. Those people don't exist, they're just in need of some therapy."
"A trans woman isn't a woman, it's a pathetic confused man."
"A trans person isn't a he or she, it's an it."

These seem like strange allowances for a policy that begins: “We believe that people use their voice and connect more freely when they don’t feel attacked on the basis of who they are,” and later states flatly, “we remove dehumanizing speech.” It is hard to imagine speech more dehumanizing than to tell someone that they have no gender and are an “it.”

Meta’s updated guidelines come at a time when lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people are under increasing threat. Last year, the Human Rights Campaign declared a national state of emergency for the transgender community. The organization, which campaigns for LGBTQ rights, found that 550 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced into state legislatures last year, and more than 40 were passed into law. The majority of those bills specifically target the freedoms of trans people. Many are intended to reduce their freedom of expression by banning queer books from libraries and removing queer experiences from public school curricula. 

The report found that at least 36 trans and gender-nonconforming people were murdered in the United States last year, half of which were Black trans women. In 2023, the last year for which complete data is available, the FBI reported a record number of hate crimes against LGBT people: more than 2,800, or nearly a quarter of all hate crimes in the United States. The report notes that this is likely an undercount given that many hate crimes are never reported.

Alex Schultz, the company’s chief marketing officer and highest-ranking gay executive, suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights.