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.
I’m sure I am speaking to the choir here, but body dismorphia is the mental illness here, and transgenderism is the cure.
Pre-transition transgender people are mentally ill, due to the emotional pain that comes from being trapped in a body that they don’t feel represents themselves. The cure for that illness is, of course, transitioning into the gender that makes them feel like themselves. So, a fully transitioned transgender person is no longer mentally ill, at least from body dismorphia.
Therefore, people who are against things like puberty blockers and HRT are literally trying to keep mentally ill people from getting better. I am okay with body dismorphia being referred to as a mental illness, in accordance with medical science. The fact that it is a mental illness shows the cruelness of the people fighting against the literal cure for it.
However, I am sure Facebook is going to just let anyone refer to perfectly happy and fully-transition transgendered people as mentally ill, which is most definitely not true, and shouldn’t be allowed.
Obligatory Fuck Zuck.
Wouldn’t that make it a physical illness, not a mental illness?
In a way, you could say that. It’s also a societal one. Its a whole lot of problems rolled up into one, really.
Body dismorphia is only a mental illness in the sense that it causes a lot of emotional distress. Not in the sense that it is a delusion or the person is crazy, or anything.