by Joe Siegel

Perhaps as an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration, Facebook has issued new policies allowing hate speech directed at the LGBTQ community.

“New content moderation policies governing hate speech on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads that were enacted by parent company Meta on … contain a carveout that allows users to call LGBTQ people mentally ill,” the Washington Blade reported on January 8.

“According to the guidelines, which otherwise prohibit use of such insults on the online platforms, ‘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 and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’ Meta also removed rules that forbid insults about a person’s appearance based on race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, and serious disease while withdrawing policies that prohibited expressions of hate against a person or a group on the basis of their protected class and references to transgender or nonbinary people as “it,” the Blade reported.

Also, “Meta removed DEI programs and deleted the transgender and non-binary Messenger themes on January 10,” according to News is Out, a queer media collaborative.

“These changes are undeniably bad,” Arturo Béjar, a former engineering director at Meta with expertise in online harassment, told the Associated Press. “I shudder to think what these changes will mean for our youth. Meta is abdicating their responsibility to safety, and we won’t know the impact of these changes because Meta refuses to be transparent about the harms teenagers experience, and they go to extraordinary lengths to dilute or stop legislation that could help.”

Independent tech journalist Taylor Lorenz also revealed that Instagram has been blocking teens from searching LGBTQ-related content.

For now, many LGBTQ editors and publishers are staying the course, despite dissatisfaction with Facebook’s new policies.

Ohio’s The Buckeye Flame “is not planning on changing our approach on existing social media platforms for the time being,” said Ken Schneck, the news site’s editor. “That said, we did create a Bluesky account in November and have incorporated posting on there into our social media strategy. In two months, we have built a greater audience there than we have on X over the past five years, and are excited to continue to engage on that platform.”

“I’m scaling back our use of [Facebook] and developing tools to get people to prioritize subscribing to our weekly newsletter,” said Patrick Farabaugh, editor of Madison, Wisc.-based Our Lives. “We’ll continue to post on each, but really not prioritize engagement in our goals on the platforms.”

Jeremy Rodriguez, editor of Philadelphia Gay News, believes there has to be a balance between an individual’s use of certain social media outlets and the need to engage with readers on those same platforms.

“While I personally have started to limit my use of problematic social media sites — which include both Meta-operated platforms as well as X, formerly known as Twitter — PGN has not made any firm decisions,” Rodriguez said. “However, we are willing to meet our audiences where they are at. Our priority is making sure our stories reach all audiences. While it may be ironic to read stories about the anti-LGBTQ+ agenda of Meta ON a Meta platform, I think it’s important to show Meta users the facts about the platform they’re currently engaging with. While our future with these platforms is uncertain, I can tell you that PGN has already started making moves to alternative platforms, such as BlueSky.”

“Although none of us here are happy with the policy, we don’t have plans to change the way we post our articles and are taking a wait and see approach,” said Michael Yamashita, publisher of San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter. “Unfortunately, advertisers use social media stats to gauge readership so we’re forced to use these platforms until something else comes along to replace them.”

IN THE NEWS
Volume 26
Issue 12