Step out of the Metaverse

Amidst a raft of content and moderation changes announced in early January, Meta made significant changes to its hateful conduct policy. Chris Rooke takes a closer look at the fine print and outlines what this means for LGBTQ+ users.

O ne of the changes made by Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, among others—is found in the section about insults, where a new carve-out has been introduced. “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 updated policy now reads.

Examples of newly permitted content were published by Casey Newton of Platformer in the days after the policy change. These internal guidelines, which are shared with employees and contractors tasked with enforcing these standards, lay out starkly the types of speech that will now be allowed on Meta platforms. Some of the sample statements include: “Trans people aren’t real. They’re mentally ill”, “Gays are not normal”, “This whole nonbinary thing is made up. Those people don’t exist, they’re just in need of some therapy”, and more.

These are not the only changes related to LGBTQ+ people contained in the policy shift. Arguments for limiting LGBTQ+ people from teaching, law enforcement, and military jobs are now allowed when based on religious beliefs. Sex and gender-exclusive language when discussing access to bathrooms and schools is also permitted. Users can additionally include insulting language when discussing political or religious topics, among which both homosexuality and transgender rights are listed.

LGBTQ+ people are not the only groups targeted by these changes: women and immigrants are also now subject to a far wider range of commentary and insult than before (CNN reported that under the new guidelines, users can refer to “women as household objects or property”). For a policy that begins with the lofty statement that “We believe that people use their voice and connect more freely when they don’t feel attacked on the basis of who they are,” it is difficult to see how its contents live up to these self-professed ideals.

But then what ideals can corporations have other than to enrich their shareholders? When these changes were announced, Meta’s executives and spokespeople took to almost any media forum that would host them to suggest that this was in the pursuit of free speech; that speech on their platforms had become too stifled and this was simply a liberation of their users to speak their minds (Meta did not respond to a request for comment from GCN). Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that he had set up Facebook originally to enable “free expression”. This is true only if what you wanted to express was your ranking of the physical appearance of women on the Harvard campus using a misogynistic ‘hot-or-not’-style website, a corporate history that perhaps gained renewed relevance as his company excised the protections from sexist content that had existed previously.

Even if we are to be generous and to take Mark at his word that the company has been aimed towards increasing freedom of speech, it does not take long for that argument to unravel. All of the comments that can now be made about queer people, women, and immigrants are still not permissible when discussing either race or religion.

This is the most revealing aspect. Far from being an idealsbased broadening of all speech allowed on their platforms, Meta has chosen specific groups that find themselves at the centre of what are commonly called the ‘culture wars’ and have declared open season on them in the hopes that it will generate favour for the company and its executives with political and cultural heavyweights who could otherwise target the company.

The company has disavowed itself from any responsibility regarding the potential real-world impacts of this targeted approach. Included in the policy update was the removal of a sentence which said that hate speech “creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion, and in some cases may promote offline violence”. Given that the organisation in 2018 agreed with an independent investigation which found that Facebook had created an “enabling environment” for the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, it seems little has been learned.

These changes feel jarring to users from those groups and communities because they have marketed themselves and been adopted as places for connection with others like us. But no matter how much we contribute to these platforms and their culture, and as much as they like to refer to themselves as ‘digital town squares’, they have never belonged to us. They belong primarily to the men who founded them and secondarily to any additional shareholders riding on their coattails, all of whom are desperate to make an extra couple of cents at whatever cost.

These men have never known fear and have never felt danger in the way that some of their users have. By the time they started receiving threats (from being in the public eye due to their inordinate wealth and influence rather than for who they are), they were rich enough to be able to inoculate and protect themselves from any real danger posed to them.

They are greedy, cowardly, and obsequious: we have seen how several have gone from advocating for the LGBTQ+ community to throwing us under the bus at the first opportunity. These reversals demonstrate a lack of any ideological consistency and instead show their enthusiasm for taking the easy path and moving with the prevailing political and cultural winds, something that members of the affected communities do not have a choice to do. We should be wary of these men’s influence. Their insistence that their wealth makes them qualified to decide what sort of society we all exist in and what sort of conduct is permissible, even when it aligns with our own beliefs, should be challenged vigorously and constantly.

That begs the question, how do we escape from the influence of these men? For starters, and most straightforwardly, we should ensure that Meta, X, and other organisations that are willingly enabling hatred to be fired in our direction do not also attempt to court favour by using our community. These groups should be prevented from engaging in any pinkwashing. They should not be permitted to parade at Pride, and any change of logo colours or performance of allyship should be questioned. Even if they reverse policy changes like these most recent ones, their attempts to ingratiate themselves should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism and cynicism.

More complicated might be our individual relationships with their companies and products. If we do not want to contribute to the continued profiting of corporations that are so keen to spread hatred towards us and use us as scapegoats, or even to prevent ourselves from being exposed to the vile discourse they believe will position them most advantageously, then we will need to stop using their services—yes, even WhatsApp.

While we are less likely to be exposed to hateful content on messaging apps, moving away from Messenger and WhatsApp will still make an impact. Even if the content of our messages is secure (and recent reports about an Israeli spyware company accessing some users’ messages suggest they are not), the value of the metadata— for example who is in our contacts, when we message, and where from—has been shown to be of incredible value to companies, as seen in the Snowden leaks in 2015. As we, and in particular younger users, have trended away from public social networks and to private group chats as a means of staying in touch, this data is becoming a cornerstone of the tracking and advertising business models on which many of these companies rely.

For social networks, an alternative where we can feel in more control is complex. What options are there other than platforms that are controlled by one of a small group of oligarchs? A real ‘digital town square’ would be owned and controlled publicly, and would be doomed from the start, both due to a lack of trust in government and a likely inability to coordinate speech policies across multiple jurisdictions.

Two technical solutions may provide answers. First are federated protocols (known as the fediverse), which allow easier transfer of data from one platform to another, or across platforms. Imagine being able to migrate your Instagram feed to another platform without losing any data, or using a queer-owned platform to follow users who are on another network using the same protocol. This way, rather than the content being locked and usable by a company, the features they offer are what users choose between, including content and moderation policies.

Second is a feature implemented by Bluesky, an opensource spin-offof Twitter which is built on one of those federated protocols. In March 2024, it introduced Ozone, which allows developers to create custom moderation controls that can then be enabled by each user, giving the user control over the moderation applied to their feed, on top of Bluesky’s community guidelines. While this does not solve the issue of dangerous speech being allowed or circulated in self-reinforcing networks, it does at least allow users to choose whether they want to engage with that speech (Bluesky does currently ban “promoting hate or extremist content that targets people” based on gender or sexual orientation).

Or perhaps, given the protections that still exist for religious beliefs, we all declare that our sexuality is part of our faith and establish a new church. I’m sure we could convince Cher to be our patron saint.