The Meta group’s moderation policy has changed. It clearly authorizes insults towards LGBT people. This modification is a continuation of Mark Zuckerberg’s change in policy to curry favor with Donald Trump.
A step back and an increasingly conservative turn for the Meta group. After removing fact-checking operations in the United States for the group’s networks, Facebook, Instagram and Thread, a few days before Donald Trump’s inauguration at the White House, Mark Zuckerberg continues his operation to seduce the billionaire ultra-conservative by modifying the moderation policies of its networks.
Until today, the group’s social networks were subject to changes in moderation policies which attempted to meet the requirements of as many countries as possible, in order to comply with the laws there. As a reminder, the moderators’ action aims to delete content that does not correspond to the network’s policy. This is, for example, how content of a sexual nature is prohibited on mainstream networks.
In the new policy published on the standards page community of Meta, consulted by franceinfowe can read that the group allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, taking into account the political and religious discourse on transgenderism and homosexuality and the common, non-serious use of words such as ‘weird’.
It is therefore completely allowed to publish hateful content about people based on their sexual identity and gender identity. Additionally, the term “transgenderism” is not used in the LGBTQIA+ community, or even in medicine. The term “transidentity” is the one that prevails, “transgenderism” corresponding to a negative vision of the people concerned. It will therefore not be uncommon to see LGBTQIA+ people described as “monsters”, “weird”, “mentally ill”, “sinful”, “unnatural”, “immoral”, “abnormal”…
The same rules in France?
This new moderation policy is applicable everywhere in the world. The group mentions on its site that these “community standards apply to everyone, everywhere and to all types of content”. However, France and Europe have very specific legislation on this subject. The European Digital Services Act (DSA) and article 225-1 of the Penal Code “prohibit discriminatory behavior based on gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation”, and the DSA requires platforms to moderate their content in this sense, with a prohibition of negligence or failure.
In order to respond to this legal problem while allowing the conservative sphere to openly discriminate in the name of freedom of expression, it is specified that users “residing in a country of the European Union” can request the legal deletion of ‘content to the platform. The role of moderation is therefore attributed to the users, and not to the social network.
If you come across this type of content on Instagram, Facebook or Thread, you can report them by clicking on the three small dots at the top right of the post, then on “report” by providing the reason for this report: “Violence, hatred or exploitation”, “false information”…