Campaigners fear spike in hate speech as Meta lifts restrictions

Tech giant Meta has rolled back restrictions around topics such as gender and sexual identity, a sweeping move advocacy groups fear will fuel hate speech.

The change coincides with the company's shock announcement on Tuesday that it was ending its third-party fact-checking program in the United States and adopting a crowd-sourced model to police misinformation similar to the Elon Musk-owned X.

The latest version of Meta's community guidelines said its platforms -- which include Facebook and Instagram -- would now permit users to accuse people of "mental illness or abnormality" based on their gender or sexual orientation.

The updated version also struck out previous restrictions on referring to women as "household objects or property," Black people as "farm equipment" and transgender or non-binary people as "it."

"We're getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate," Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, wrote in a blog post.

"It's not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms."

But advocacy groups quickly voiced concern that the policy shift threatened the safety of marginalized communities.

"Removal of fact-checking programs and industry-standard hate speech policies make Meta's platforms unsafe places," said Sarah Kate Ellis, president of the advocacy group GLAAD.

"Without these necessary hate speech and other policies, Meta is giving the green light for people to target LGBTQ people, women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups with violence, vitriol, and dehumanizing narratives."

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, in a video announcing the changes, claimed the previous restrictions on immigration and gender were "just out of touch with mainstream discourse."

"What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it has gone too far," Zuckerberg said.

The move comes just weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House with his Republican Party also back in control of Congress after fiercely attacking social media speech restrictions during the election campaign.

Gender identity issues were also a key line of attack by Trump and Republicans against their Democratic opponents.

After the move was announced on Tuesday, CyberWell, a nonprofit focused on combating online antisemitism, denounced the "systematic lowering of the bar" by Meta on policies against hate speech and harassment.

"This change particularly undermines the safety of all marginalized communities," CyberWell executive director Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor said in a statement.

© Agence France-Presse