Meta announced a series of major updates to its content moderation policies today, including ending its fact-checking partnerships and “getting rid” of restrictions on speech about “topics like immigration, gender identity and gender” that the company describes as frequent subjects of political discourse and debate. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” Meta’s newly appointed chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, wrote in a blog post outlining the changes.
In an accompanying video, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the company’s current rules in these areas as “just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
In tandem with this announcement, the company made a number of updates across its Community Guidelines, an extensive set of rules that outline what kinds of content are prohibited on Meta’s platforms, including Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. Some of the most striking changes were made to Meta’s “Hateful Conduct” policy, which covers discussions on immigration and gender.
In a notable shift, the company now says it 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.’”
In other words, Meta now appears to permit users to accuse transgender or gay people of being mentally ill because of their gender expression and sexual orientation. The company did not respond to requests for clarification on the policy.
https://archive.ph/2NpvC non-paywalled link
Your response doesn’t address my initial point. Again, don’t make that false equivalence.
I’m sure I am speaking to the choir here, but body dismorphia is the mental illness here, and transgenderism is the cure.
Pre-transition transgender people are mentally ill, due to the emotional pain that comes from being trapped in a body that they don’t feel represents themselves. The cure for that illness is, of course, transitioning into the gender that makes them feel like themselves. So, a fully transitioned transgender person is no longer mentally ill, at least from body dismorphia.
Therefore, people who are against things like puberty blockers and HRT are literally trying to keep mentally ill people from getting better. I am okay with body dismorphia being referred to as a mental illness, in accordance with medical science. The fact that it is a mental illness shows the cruelness of the people fighting against the literal cure for it.
However, I am sure Facebook is going to just let anyone refer to perfectly happy and fully-transition transgendered people as mentally ill, which is most definitely not true, and shouldn’t be allowed.
Obligatory Fuck Zuck.
Wouldn’t that make it a physical illness, not a mental illness?
In a way, you could say that. It’s also a societal one. Its a whole lot of problems rolled up into one, really.
Body dismorphia is only a mental illness in the sense that it causes a lot of emotional distress. Not in the sense that it is a delusion or the person is crazy, or anything.
The factuality of this is irrelevant as 99% of the time this will be used as a weapon to bully people. No one on facebook talks about metaphysics. Does anyone really think that there are meta discussions about the origins “of the gay” and what it means in our collective society?
Americans really fucked the world with their elections this year and it’s just the beginning.
You can now refer to women as property on Facebook and they are A-OK with that! But you will, and it has happened to me, catch an instant ban if you say all men are trash.
Maybe it’s just me but I don’t think people should be saying or be allowed to say either of those two things. Neither of those two things are good for anyone.
I suppose that was ops point
In the context I said it myself it was because of Trump the rapist. I am very tired of women being raped and everything that comes with conservatives normalizing it.
I think people should be able to say whatever bs they want to, but their identity should be attached to it.
Okay, whats your name, ip address, address, social security number …
That’s fine, I just choose to share last. Same as gun control. Every other entity needs to be disarmed. Every fucking government and billionaire too. Then I’m good with sharing everything.
I stopped letting Meta take my attention once they started making my feed fill itself with “reccomended” “you might like” pages and profiles that I at no point ever clicked on or searched for.
before, my feed was exclusively my friends content, and pages I followed.
now, they fill the gaps with evangelicals, gambling, and idiots posting chinese and russian war propaganda.
yup, get the fuck out. im done.
My entire feed is just nonsense now. Last year a guy I knew from my Warcraft days had cancer while a relative in Canada had a baby.
They both posted these things on Facebook.
What Facebook showed me was constant spam, so now I just see chess puzzle channels from India, street cooking videos from places with no hygiene laws, magic eye pictures and retro games. I’ve never asked it for any of these things, yet some algorithm detected I paused for a millisecond while scrolling past them so now that’s all I get. Fuck the people I know, right?
It used to be useful for exactly one thing and it can’t even do that any more. The only way you can actually see a proper feed without spam is to go into a person/group’s profile directly.
I decided I was going to discontinue using Meta products except to put out an occasional Instagram photo, pushed to Facebook, to tell…people I don’t even talk to anymore, and for good reason…that I was alive and a sight of what I was doing. I discontinued my old Facebook profile and made a new one only for this purpose.
Because Facebook kind of sees me as a new user, I’m able to see content I wasn’t able to before. And fuck, that place feels like some weird scam and bot flea market.
I hope it’s soon to die but who knows if it’ll transform into some unmasked arm of the government for surveillance.
I use the website / app for exactly one purpose, marketplace. buy and sell shit.
I still have messenger for work purposes, as well as some family and friends. but the “Feed”. the status updates, Fuck no. burn it all.
And you can’t even browse marketplace on the mobile site. It wants you to install their app.
And you get ads for anything you look up on Marketplace.
Oh it’s a complete ghost town. Absolutely useless as actual social media. I suppose you could try starring/favoriting all your friends lol…
Presumably they’ll roll back their censorship of Palestinian journalists now they love free speech so much.
you see, free speech is only for reactionaries.
That’s pretty much what conservative/right-wing ‘freedom’ is: freedom for me but not for thee.
It’s also his first mammalian penis
Do we not get to count all the foreskins he’s eaten?
cool it with the anti-semitism
Isn’t that pro-semitism?
Possibly, either way I’m taking the piss.
lol as is tradition
“It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” Meta’s newly appointed chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, wrote in a blog post outlining the changes.
This is the same Joel Kaplan that participated in the brooks brothers riot stopping the recount of the ballots during the bush v gore election in 2000 where the republicans stole the election forever changing the course of American history.
He praised X, a competitor, in his video announcement. I guess Musk was right. “Zuck is a cuck.”
I’ll bite. Meta, obviously, never actually cared about free speech. Zuckerberg also said that they are about to flood the platforms with AI bots to increase engagement. I’d say getting rid of fact checkers is only to avoid having their own bots automatically brought down by their own moderation. The rest is a façade
More exploitation of the seniors who are the few people left
Astute observation. I’m glad I stopped using the platform years ago but it seems like they’re focused on trying to innovate their tech more than the actual engagement.
Based on what I’ve seen on the platform I didn’t realize they even had that rule in the first place
People need to get a grip. This really feels like mass psychosis.
- Walk into Nazi bar.
- Pay dues to be a member (consume advertising, provide personal data).
- Be astonished at the fascist rhetoric of the Nazi bar!
If it were possible it would be fascinating to study the brains of people who do this. Is it old scar tissue from physical blows? Lesions from infections or illness? Just too much drugs and alcohol? Perhaps it’s a vascular issue from failing organs and too much salt? Food dye, radiation, lead?
Comparing Facebook to a Nazi bar is ridiculous.
Facebook, just like all social media companies, has continually used the overton window as its standard for acceptable content. When political leanings shift, the way the company polices content on its platform, chooses what topics to boost or bury, and decides what topics to promote as part of its corporate culture changes.
It is by its very nature the thing that maximizes the political acceptableness of content for advertisers to appear next to. Most people joined Facebook when the political climate was nowhere near as right-wing as it is now, so it’s not like they walked in, saw a sign that said “We’re Nazis” and went “okay, this is fine.”
The fact they’re changing their hateful conduct policy now is what’s turning them into the Nazi bar, they weren’t always that way. (and yes, I’m aware Facebook and Zuck did tons of horrible shit in the past, but as a platform it wasn’t anywhere near the level of terrible it will be now, nor did it have anywhere near Nazi levels of political leanings)
And not to mention how the network effect kind of changes this from “Nazi Bar” to “Nazi City” because it has a much more difficult process to escape due to it quite literally holding you and all your friends, family, photos, and videos hostage. There’s less of a choice when it comes to leaving platforms that ensnare you with network effects than there is to simply leave a bar.
Comparing Facebook to a Nazi bar is ridiculous.
not really considering meta has several nazis on their board.
Who exactly? At present I’m wholly unaware of anybody on the FB board who I’d call a Nazi.
I’m genuinely asking by the way, that isn’t meant to be some kind of rebuttal.
However, I would again note the fact that any current board members were likely not on the board when many Facebook users joined, (and the lock-in they experience keeps them there) and even if they were, what kind of person is ever aware of individual corporate board members?
Extrapolating that back out to your Nazi bar analogy, that would be like if you went into a bar, the people in there were your friends and family, the workers at the front were normal people, but the person who owned the LLC behind the bar was a Nazi. In that case, to “be astonished at the fascist rhetoric of the Nazi bar” isn’t exactly unexpected!
I’m trans. I do have mental illness. It’s because society keeps sending me signals that I shouldn’t exist.
For what it’s worth, I am hereby sending you the official signal that you should absolutely exist, that you have every right to be yourself, and that your continued existence is important and meaningful for yourself and others in similar situations especially. I hope you will forever be gifted with the courage to be yourself, even when the world is challenging you on it.
It’s the village, not the individuals. Our society is fucking sick. I’m straight, but it (the intolerance and violence towards people who are different) makes me sick.
This person gets it.
Thank you.
Is gender dysphoria not considered a health issue?? Legit asking. Like I thought the whole point of transitioning is that that is the treatment for it. That’s not a BAD thing, but it is A thing. Calling gay people mentally ill is obviously non sense. Calling ALL trans people mentally ill I don’t think is accurate… if they’ve actually transitioned lmao. Then they’re not sick anymore ?? Plz let me know if that take is incorrect. Feel like having pre-transition gender dysphoria compared to other mental illnesses like anxiety/depression/etc is a positive thing because it normalizes it to a degree.
Big difference between them being… there IS actually a cure to gender dysphoria compared to many other mental illnesses that can only be treated. Arguing with a right winger about this shit, he said he felt bad for trans people and that they were mentally ill. My response was “yeah no shit, you realize the way to reduce their risk of suicide is by letting them get the care they and their doctors deem necessary. It’s straight cruelty to acknowledge that it is something they need help with yet demonizing them for seeking help.”
Guess the people saying shit like the headline aren’t doing so with nuance in mind, and for them anyone trans at all = weird/mentally ill/sick.
The whole thing with trans health is that being trans is not considered a mental illness but gender dysphoria still has a diagnostic rubric and has health problems associated. So saying trans people who have transitioned aren’t sick anymore isn’t quite accurate because they were never considered sick in the first place. One of the ideas behind this way of thinking is a trans person’s issues aren’t caused because they are trans, it’s caused largely due to the lack of acceptance and support in the society around trans people. Framing transness as a mental illness also ignores the flipside of dysphoria - gender euphoria which is a very specific joy experienced by trans people expressing themselves healthily, it’s not simply from lessening pain around dysphoria, it’s basically something mostly unique to the trans experience that is overwhelmingly positive.
Also there’s not a one size fits all response to dysphoria. Some chose to physically transition and others choose to use other management techniques to help. There isn’t a “cure” to gender dysphoria. There are limits to what can be achieved through physical transition even if one goes all the way. One can have dysphoria around stuff like not having periods and child bearing capabilities even if they are fully transitioned or there are things that are irreversible if the transition happens too late. Being trans can be a kind of complicated state of being where one needs to learn and implement how best to be supported. Framing it not as an illness removes the stigma of looking at the experience entirely clinically as something to be solved. The fix isn’t to be “less trans” as it is when one approaches something as a disorder to be removed and minimized.
What trump wants to do to trans people is the equivalent of lobotomizing everyone with bipolar disorder because you don’t believe the accepted treatments work.
Gender dyspohoria is a mental health condition the same way ADHD is. Do you run around calling people with ADHD mentally ill? No. And, gender dysphoria is one of the easiest neurodivergent conditions to treat. You let the person be the gender they already know they are. Doing anything else may as well be lobotomizing them. It’s unacceptable and creates more problems. Plus it’s fucking cruel.
Feature not bug.jpeg
Gotta have an out group for the in group to vilify and all that :| I do get your point about calling someone with any kind of mental illness “mentally ill”. That does feel rude. It’s “technically correct*” but that doesn’t make it less rude.
From googling 23% of US adults (assumed because current empire. Even being a US citizen, having some knowledge of history I can’t blame people in other countries hoping/plotting to knock Hamburgerland down a few pegs because that’s what happens, and we are absolutely past the zenith of American dominance) have a diagnosed mental illness. Lotta folks probably are undiagnosed. As is consistent with history, even in this golden era of mental health awareness, trans people are being othered. I would be curious to see some graphs of trans folk being mentioned in newspapers/magazines since the 1920s as a ratio of printed pieces.
Is gender dysphoria not considered a health issue […] Feel like having pre-transition gender dysphoria compared to other mental illnesses like anxiety/depression/etc is a positive thing because it normalizes it to a degree.
There’s an inherent problem of definitions here:
Consider: does the DSM classify transgender as a mental disorder? Hard to say. It includes 302.85: Gender Dysphoria, defined as “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender”. It also includes approximately one million caveats saying that transgender definitely isn’t a mental disorder. Why the contradiction? Because regardless of the philosophical definition of mental disorder, the practical definition is:
- If you call something a mental disorder, insurance has to cover treatment for it, which is good.
- But if you call something a mental disorder, people will accuse you of trying to stigmatize them, which is bad.
The DSM writers are trans-friendly and want to make sure trans people can get the care they need (for example, in most states, people need a psych evaluation before they can get gender affirmation surgery), so they want to force insurance companies to cover transgender, so they have to include it. But they also don’t want to stigmatize trans people, so they also include a lot of paragraphs about how even though they just listed it as a mental disorder, it definitely isn’t a mental disorder.
You pretty much have it right. Many-to-most trans people will suffer from or experience gender dysphoria to varying degrees, which is treated with hormone replacement therapy, transitioning, surgery, psychotherapy, etc… Once trans people are at a state where they feel comfortable with their bodies (or achieve a congruence between their inner and outer selves), then gender dysphoria is technically no longer present, but may return if the body or the mind changes and are no longer congruent.
Medically, this means that trans people can have an official diagnosis of gender dysphoria and get treatment for it. Gender dysphoria then goes away (hopefully) and preventative treatment like HRT continues.
Trans people can obviously also have mental disorders unrelated to being trans.
Edit: To clarify, neither being trans nor experiencing gender dysphoria are mental disorders. Gender dysphoria is listed in the DSM-5 in order for proper treatment by health professionals and for insurance coverage.
My thoughts exactly. As an outsider looking in, how would you classify gender dysphoria other than an illness?
It’s treatable, just not the way religious fanatics want to.
I would classify it as a neurodivergent condition.
Do you call people with ADHD mentally ill?
So what is a condition if not an illness? Can you have a beneficial medical condition? Maybe it’s because English is my second language, but this is part of the confusion.
Well, technically they are. It’s a detrimental neurological condition. It doesn’t to my knowledge benefit a person to have untreated ADHD. Or as they say, a untreated mental illnessl. I don’t much care for the padding of language, rather I would remove the stigma by using the term without judgement.
I think i’m seeing it as a classification tree, i could see Illness branching off to mental illness and then there would be an immense amount of mental illnesses. Somewhere there neuro divergence would be and perhaps ADHD under there.
Calling anyone with a mental health disorder these days is considered extremely rude to begin with. Also, at least in America, people with a condition like ADHD or Autism aren’t considered mentally ill, they’re considered neurodivergent. Which is a term with a much nicer connontation than would be used for someone with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Yes, it’s all semantics, but if you’re going to be talking to people with these conditions, the semantics matter. Don’t call trans people mentally ill. Hell don’t call anyone mentally ill. It’s like calling someone with downs syndrome the r-slur.
I’m not calling anybody anything. You misunderstand my point. Being rude is different from differentiating from the technical categorization of words. They are both. Neuro divergent is a category of mental illness.
I wouldn’t call anybody mentally ill, cause it is too simplistic and rude. But it still is what the word means.
Lmaooooo exactly how that convo went with that guy. “Yes theyre sick but think about all the people who transitioned before they were adults who regret it… I am going to focus on those people and ignore how 95% of cases the person doesn’t regret it.”
98% don’t regret it and those who do overwhemingly onlu regret it because of how society treats them.
I didn’t know that “how society treats them” with the regret part o.o can you source on that for future reference
deleted by creator
You listen to society? They’re the ones that invented gender characteristics and stereotypes. If you listen to them there’s a chance you’ll get caught up in their bullshit instead of just being what you’d be if there was no other human on earth.
Kind of hard not to listen to society when you’re a part of it. It’s like saying to try to not listen to the music while you’re at a nightclub.
I’d like out of this nightclub. Maybe move to a different, more pleasant nightclub.
I understand that are trying to be nice, but it’s kinda rude tbh. Because you are making it seem like the problems they have aren’t actually real. They might not have an alternative nightclub to go to because all of them are shit, or they can’t go to another nightclub.
I disagree, it can be read like that but I feel it’s clear that’s not what they meant. I think there not being a different nightclub to go to is implied, didn’t even think it could have been meant another way before I read your comment.
Oh, my apologies. That wasn’t my intention at all.
I fully sympathise with not feeling like you belong in this society, I feel that way too. I’ve always felt that way. Sadly, I think precious few people are able to actually function and live separate from society, it requires a lot of means (money, mostly) that most people simply don’t have. We can’t choose to walk away from society, and so we’re forced to live and operate inside of it.
The problems are very much real, and to me it feels like the best solution would be a new society rather than conforming to the BS we have to be in. That’s just a pipe dream, though.
You’re good, IMO, it’s clear you didn’t imply that they can just “move to another nightclub” and that not being able to is what you actually implied. Seen that exact comparison before with life being a loud nightclub and there are no others to go to.
Society can get fucked. You’re valid. Normal people want you here.
It’s our current iteration of society that shouldn’t exist.
“getting rid” of restrictions on speech about “topics like immigration, gender identity and gender” that the company describes as frequent subjects of political discourse and debate. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,”
Yet when my mom tried to post about a museum visit, Facebook wouldn’t let her because it contained the word “Lenin”. Interesting.
Can you elaborate?
Not much to elaborate here, the situation was what I described above. As for how this is relevant to the post, I feel like Meta/Facebook has also jumped on the “free speech for me but not for thee” bandwagon.
Someone with a Facebook account wanna go make a post with Lenin and see if another account can view it lmao
