Meta Now Lets Users Say Gay and Trans People Have ‘Mental Illness’
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Meta rolled out a number of changes to its “Hateful Conduct” policy Tuesday as part of a sweeping overhaul of its approach toward content moderation.

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.

    • @teslasaur
      1•1 day ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 day ago

        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.

        • @teslasaur
          1•1 day ago

          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.