When I heard the other day that Nick Clegg had stepped down as Meta's President of Global Affairs, the news that followed about Meta were making changes to their content moderation policies wasn't surprising. Nick Clegg was responsible for setting up the platform's Oversight Board which, in turn, was the ultimate body responsible for content moderation decisions.
Since then, more details about these changes have been published which has led me to start winding down my use of Facebook and other Meta products.
I've explained it all in a Facebook post, kind of a parting post, which I've reproduced here:
Hey Facebook friends, I hope you're keeping well and warm.
TL;DR: Facebook now says it's OK to call gay/trans people mentally ill, or to say they should be excluded from certain jobs, benefits, etc. I've started deleting Facebook content and scaling back on my use of Meta.
You may have recently heard about Facebook/Meta updating their community standards, their fact checking services, and, their Hateful Conduct Policy. The latest change to the HCP, effective as of yesterday, says that it's not OK to say someone is mentally ill or abnormal UNLESS they're LGBTQ+. They've specifically called out the community as being OK to throw abuse at. Elsewhere, they say that it's acceptable to exclude or call to exclude people from work or "economic entitlements" based on sexual orientation under the guise of religious beliefs.
The screenshots I've attached show these new edits highlighted in green (their own highlights to show the edits made), and you can see them for yourself at https://transparency.meta.com/en-gb/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/
I've been thinking about winding down my Facebook for some time, but these changes put another nail in Facebook's coffin for me.
My Instagram content has already gone, and my Facebook photos have been downloaded, so it's likely that a lot of my profile will go the same way in the near-future.
WhatsApp will be harder to get rid of, but I can't change other people's method of communication single-handedly.
Am I telling you that you should delete your profiles and accounts too? Absolutely not, that's a decision for you. But I'm not feeling welcome on a platform that's explicitly saying it's OK to call people mentally ill because of their sexuality or gender identity. Content like that should not be endorsed, religious beliefs or not, and these policy changes and cuts to content moderation are the same red flags I saw with Twitter.
Where else can you find me?
I'm on Mastodon, the Twitter-like alternative, at https://mastodonapp.uk/@cjhearn or if you're on BlueSky you can follow my "bridge" account at https://bsky.app/profile/cjhearn.mastodonapp.uk.ap.brid.gy. I won't be able to see all of your interactions but you can at least follow my posts without having to join Mastodon. I also have Signal as a WhatsApp alternative - although not used it yet - but you can find me at [redacted]. There's also my own website at https://cjhearn.co.uk.
So, yeah, you can expect to see less of me around here.
kthnxbai