Meta is now granting its users new freedom to post a wide array of derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities, training materials obtained by The Intercept reveal.

Examples of newly permissible speech on Facebook and Instagram highlighted in the training materials include:

“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”

“Gays are freaks.”

“Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl).”

The changes are part of a broader policy shift that includes the suspension of the company’s fact-checking program. The goal, Meta said Tuesday, is to “allow more speech by lifting restrictions.”

Meta’s newly appointed global policy chief Joel Kaplan described the effort in a statement as a means to fix “complex systems to manage content on our platforms, which are increasingly complicated for us to enforce.”

While Kaplan and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have couched the changes as a way to allow users to engage more freely in ideological dissent and political debate, the previously unreported policy materials reviewed by The Intercept illustrate the extent to which purely insulting and dehumanizing rhetoric is now accepted.

The document provides those working on Meta user content with an overview of the hate speech policy changes, walking them through how to apply the new rules. The most significant changes are accompanied by a selection of “relevant examples” — hypothetical posts marked either “Allow” or “Remove.”

When asked about the new policy changes, Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss referred The Intercept to remarks from Kaplan’s blog post announcing the shift: “We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”

Kate Klonick, a content moderation policy expert who spoke to The Intercept, contests Meta’s framing that the new rules as less politicized, given the latitude they provide to attack conservative bogeymen.

“Drawing lines around content moderation was alway a political enterprise,” said Klonick, an associate professor of law at St. John’s University and scholar of content moderation policy. “To pretend these new rules are any more ‘neutral’ than the old rules is a farce and a lie.”

She sees the shifts announced by Kaplan — a former White House deputy chief of staff under George W. Bush and Zuckerberg’s longtime liaison to the American right — as “the open political capture of Facebook, particularly because the changes are pandering to a........

© The Intercept