Meta’s New Content Policy Will Harm Vulnerable Users. If It Really Valued Free Speech, It Would Make These Changes

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Earlier this week, when Meta announced changes to their content moderation processes, we were hopeful that some of those changes—which we will address in more detail in this post—would enable greater freedom of expression on the company’s platforms, something for which we have advocated for many years. While Meta’s initial announcement primarily addressed changes to its misinformation policies and included rolling back over-enforcement and automated tools that we have long criticized, we expressed hope that “Meta will also look closely at its content moderation practices with regards to other commonly censored topics such as LGBTQ+ speech, political dissidence, and sex work.”

Facebook has a clear and disturbing track record of silencing and further marginalizing already oppressed peoples, and then being less than forthright about their content moderation policy.

However, shortly after our initial statement was published, we became aware that rather than addressing those historically over-moderated subjects, Meta was taking the opposite tack and —as reported by the Independent—was making targeted changes to its hateful conduct policy that would allow dehumanizing statements to be made about certain vulnerable groups. 

It was our mistake to formulate our responses and expectations on what is essentially a marketing video for upcoming policy changes before any of those changes were reflected in their documentation. We prefer to focus on the actual impacts of online censorship felt by people, which

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