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by jsheard 531 days ago
Part of the pushback is because they are still dictating what you can say except for some very particular exceptions which give away their true intentions. You're still not allowed to call someone mentally ill as an insult, unless you're doing it homophobically or transphobically, in which case it's now explicitly allowed.

https://bsky.app/profile/esqueer.net/post/3lf72fz3fas22

If they'd removed that rule altogether then it could be handwaved as merely "free speech absolutism", for better or worse, but officially stating that certain minorities are acceptable targets of abuse that's otherwise forbidden is something else entirely.

3 comments

I’m still shaken by this, two days later.

It’s not a mistake or some kind of ambiguous rule that could be misread. Following is the direct quote from Meta’s new guidelines. You can’t insult people based on:

Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. 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.”

They’re carving out specific minorities to exclude them from protections afforded to everybody else.

It’s exactly like saying: “You can’t doxx anyone on our platform, except Jews because that’s political and religious discourse about where heathens live.”

So here we are in 2025, and this barely gets a mention in the press because they’re so overwhelmed by the president-elect pretending to invade Denmark and whatever.

I’m a middle-aged bisexual man. My childhood and early teenage years coincided with the darkest times of the HIV epidemic. At 13 I was deadly afraid of AIDS, and I’m still trying to overcome the internalized homophobia from those times. For years I just tried to blend in, dated women, eventually got married, had children. I thought society had made real progress, but now it’s starting to dawn on me that it’s a mirage like Roe vs Wade or 1920s Berlin, and it can be stripped away at any time. And I feel like a miserable coward for all these years “just minding my own business” and never stepping up to support the community in any way, letting somebody else do the work. That needs to change. I’ll rather be mentally ill than hide in the shadows.

The resurgence in homophobia (amongst other things) is very concerning. Hell, you have people in this very thread that are making homophobic comments openly, attached to their real name and business portfolio. It seems they've stopped even pretending to not be hateful. I can only hope this is a temporary phenomenon.
Yup. The line about the "non serious usage of 'weird'" is another blatant sign of their true intentions. There's no reason to specify that unless you're upset over it because it was used against conservatives.
Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel, that Vader without a helmet looking Google bro Schmidt? Super fucking weird people. And not in a good way.
Lets give them time to cook. It's likely the team refactoring these rules are mostly the same team that was leading the previous censorship. It's going to take some time to open back up.
You think they sent Zuck out there to talk about half-baked ideas ?
I don't think anyone "sent Zuck out there" - this policy reversal isn't a bottom up decision.