The shocking things you can now say on Meta's platforms

Alongside Meta's sweeping overhaul of its fact-check policy announced this week, an impactful update went unnoticed in the noise. The platform, which boasts over a combined three billion users on Facebook, Threads and Instagram, updated its hateful content policy, loosening the reins on a torrent of potentially harmful content.

Many changes, tweaks and removals have occurred, but we're highlighting the most alarming ones here. Now, referring to women as "household objects or property" is permissible. So is reducing transgender and non-binary individuals to an impersonal "it." The specific prohibitions against these dehumanising comparisons have vanished. 

Previously, such comments were subject to removal under the policy. 

The outright ban on comparing individuals to animals, pathogens, or insects remains, but the revised policy adopts a wider spectrum of derogatory language. Comparisons to "faeces, filth, bacteria, viruses, diseases, and primitives" now fall within acceptable boundaries. The chilling assertion that transgender people "do not exist" is also given a free pass.

However, LGBTQ+ media advocacy group GLAAD  reported last year that Meta often failed to remove posts violating its hate speech policies. Now, even those guardrails that had been established to protect people from internet harassment are disappearing.

The sweeping changes continue with the erasure of warnings against self-professed racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia. Common hateful slurs, once flagged, are now given a free pass. Even the crucial language prohibiting content linking protected characteristics with claims about spreading the Covid virus has been scrubbed, so it is now acceptable to accuse some people – say, the Chinese – of bearing responsibility for the global pandemic.

Perhaps most chillingly, Meta has quietly removed a crucial sentence acknowledging hate speech's potential to "promote offline violence." This omission is particularly disturbing given the platform's documented role in inciting real-world violence, including its contribution to the 2017 Rohingya crisis in Myanmar.

While some existing prohibitions remain—including those against Holocaust denial, blackface, and accusations of Jewish control over the media—the overall direction of these changes is undeniable.  Campaign Asia-Pacific has been monitoring the impact of Meta's content moderation overhaul. It will continue to report on the ramifications of brand advertising on the platform and for the broader social media landscape in Asia Pacific in the coming days, as these will be potentially devastating.

The changes to Meta’s hateful conduct policy was first reported by Wired.