Mentions Meta/Facebook

The other bit of background worth understanding here is that Meta has been desperately seeking a path to regulatory capture for quite some time now. It’s been practically begging for Congress to pass child safety legislation that only the largest companies (like itself) could comply with. Indeed, Meta has done this before. It went against the rest of the internet industry in embracing FOSTA, again to try to create a regulatory moat. So this shouldn’t be surprising.

Meta’s failed forays into the “metaverse” and AI have shown that it’s been pretty consistently losing the innovation race, and the government granting it a regulatory moat that smaller competitors can’t cross would be a godsend.

And it’s even better when it can be done in a way that looks like Meta “losing” a lawsuit.

So that’s what Meta gets here. They “settle” the lawsuit so the AGs and Meta haters can all claim that they’ve “protected the children.” Meta pays out over a decade — enough that it’s taking a $10 billion legal charge in Q3, which stings for a bit but will mostly be forgotten by next year. Meta can easily eat the cost. And then Meta agrees to implement a bunch of kid safety features, most of which we have no idea whether they actually protect any kids. Notably, a legislature could not have mandated most of these features without running straight into the First Amendment — but coming out of a settlement, they carry the imprimatur of law anyway (more on that in a moment), and the structure of the agreement makes it so that Meta has to actively encourage Google and TikTok to take identical steps, thereby setting in concrete what steps any platform will have to take to be considered following “best practices” and therefore acceptable to most of the country’s Attorneys General.

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You can argue that these feature changes sound like they should help kids. Limiting access to two hours a day (unless parents grant more, which many will), lights out at midnight, disappearing like counts — these all sound like they’ll help some kids. But if it turns out that locking kids out of these systems actually pushes the most vulnerable ones to darker places with no trust & safety team at all, you won’t hear about that from Meta or the AGs.

We just spent three years teaching the entire industry that if you do research on child safety, you’ll have it held against you. Do we really think that all of this is going to actually enable anyone to figure out what works to help actual kids?

Meta bought itself a moat. The AGs bought themselves headlines that will be useful next election season. And every teenager in the country was just automatically enrolled in an untested experiment. There’s a five year independent auditor requirement to confirm that Meta follows the rules. But not to see if the rules work.

The crackdown is part of a broader censorship of crucial sexual and reproductive health and rights information tracked by global NGO ReproUncensored all around the world.

Founder and executive director Martha Dimitratou told Index they have documented nearly 600 cases across big tech platforms in Australia and globally, with more than a dozen new cases reported in just the last few days.

Dimitratou said that Australia’s world-first teen social media ban, introduced last year and now set to be followed by about 20 other countries, could be to blame.

Adam Finch, marketing, branding and communications coordinator for Brisbane-based nonprofit HIV charity, Queensland Positive People, said that he had recently had one set of the same posts approved one day but then censored the next.

“I think we’ve just managed to dodge a bullet (but) in many ways it’s a matter of time,” he told Index, adding that they were starting to self-censor.

Dimitratou said that Meta and Google must be held accountable and provide full transparency on why awareness campaigns were being restricted.

“They must take immediate steps to ensure their moderation systems do not block lawful, evidence-based public health information,” she said.

“Finally, governments must reclaim democratic oversight from the growing sovereignty of US big tech companies, enforce the law, and call these practices what they are: illegal.”

In an answer to the question “Do insults about mental illness and abnormality violate when targeting people on the basis of gender or sexual orientation?” Meta now answers “no.” It gave the following examples of posts that do not violate its policies:

   Non-violating: "Boys are weird."
   Non-violating: "Trans people aren't real. They're mentally ill."
   Non-violating: "Gays are not normal."
   Non-violating: "Women are crazy."
   Non-violating: "Trans people are freaks."

And in a follow-up questions about whether denying that a protected class violates the hateful content policy, Meta also answers no. It gave these as examples of posts that are now allowed on Facebook and Instagram:

    "There's no such thing as trans children."
   "God created two genders, 'transgender' people are not a real thing."
   "This whole nonbinary thing is made up. Those people don't exist, they're just in need of some therapy."
   "A trans woman isn't a woman, it's a pathetic confused man."
   "A trans person isn't a he or she, it's an it."

These seem like strange allowances for a policy that begins: “We believe that people use their voice and connect more freely when they don’t feel attacked on the basis of who they are,” and later states flatly, “we remove dehumanizing speech.” It is hard to imagine speech more dehumanizing than to tell someone that they have no gender and are an “it.”

Tory Brown’s debut game, published by Fort Circle Games, catapulted both designer and publisher into the board gaming limelight following its release in 2022, picking up widespread praise from reviewers including Polygon’s Charlie Hall, who named it one of the year’s best board games, and game design luminaries including Undaunted series co-designer David Thompson.

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But Fort Circle founder Kevin Bertram told BoardGameWire the Facebook ads for the campaign he has been submitting since the start of the New Year are all being rejected after a very short amount of time on the site.

The automated response Bertram is receiving from Facebook says the ads are being rejected because they either mention a politician or are about “sensitive social issues”, which “could influence how people vote and may impact the outcome of an election or pending legislation”.

His requests for review have also all been rejected.

Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship of social media amid the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups that began on October 7, 2023. This systemic online censorship has risen against the backdrop of unprecedented violence, including an estimated 1,200 people killed in Israel, largely in the Hamas-led attack on October 7, and over 18,000 Palestinians killed as of December 14, largely as a result of intense Israeli bombardment.

Between October and November 2023, Human Rights Watch documented over 1,050 takedowns and other suppression of content Instagram and Facebook that had been posted by Palestinians and their supporters, including about human rights abuses. Human Rights Watch publicly solicited cases of any type of online censorship and of any type of viewpoints related to Israel and Palestine. Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel. The documented cases include content originating from over 60 countries around the world, primarily in English, all of peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways. This distribution of cases does not necessarily reflect the overall distribution of censorship. Hundreds of people continued to report censorship after Human Rights Watch completed its analysis for this report, meaning that the total number of cases Human Rights Watch received greatly exceeded 1,050.