Mentions Meta/Facebook

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.

[…] 

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.