Meta now lets users say gays and transgender people are “mentally ill.”

Meta announced today made a number of important updates to its content moderation policies, including termination fact-checking partnerships and “remove” restrictions on speech on “topics such as immigration, gender identity and gender,” which the company describes as common topics of political discourse and debate. “It’s not right for things to be said on television or in Congress but not on our platforms,” said Meta’s newly appointed chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan wrote in a Blog post explain the changes.

In an accompanying video, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the company’s current rules in these areas as “simply out of step with mainstream discourse.”

Alongside this announcement, the company has made a series of updates to its Community Guidelines, a comprehensive set of rules that outline what types of content are prohibited on Meta’s platforms, including Instagram, Threads and Facebook. Some of the most noticeable changes have been made to Metas “Hateful behavior” policy covering discussions about immigration and gender.

In a notable shift, the company now states that it “allows claims of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given the political and religious discourse surrounding transgenderism and homosexuality and the frequent, non-serious use of Words like ‘strange’.”

In other words, Meta now appears to allow users to accuse transgender or gay people of being mentally ill based on their gender expression and sexual orientation. The company did not respond to requests for clarification on the policy.

Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss told WIRED that these restrictions are being eased worldwide. When asked whether the company would adopt different policies in countries with strict hate speech regulations, Chambliss responded pointed Please refer to Meta’s current policies regarding implementation of local laws.

Other key changes made to Meta’s hateful conduct policy on Tuesday include:

• Remove language that prohibits content that targets people based on their “protected characteristics,” which include race, ethnicity and gender identity, when combined with “claims that they have or are spreading the coronavirus.” Without this provision, it would now be entirely possible, for example, to accuse the Chinese of being responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.
• A new addition appears to create space for people who want to post about, for example, women not being allowed to serve in the military or men not being allowed to teach math because of their gender. Meta now allows content that advocates for “gender restrictions on military, law enforcement, and teaching jobs.” We also allow the same content based on sexual orientation if the content is based on religious beliefs.
• Another update explains what Meta allows in conversations about social exclusion. It now states that “people sometimes use gendered or gendered expressions when talking about access to spaces that are often restricted by sex or gender, such as: “For example, access to restrooms, certain schools, certain military, law enforcement or teaching roles, and health or support.” Previously, this carve-out was only available for discussions about limiting health and support groups to one gender.
• Meta’s hateful conduct policy previously opened by noting that hateful speech can “promote offline violence.” That sentence, which had been in the policy since 2019, was removed from the updated version released Tuesday. (In 2018, Meta, according to reports from human rights groups approved that his platform was used to incite violence against religious minorities in Myanmar.) The update retains language at the end of the policy that prohibits content that could “incite imminent violence or intimidation.”