With Meta’s recent speech policy changes regarding immigration, in which the company will allow people to call immigrants pieces of trash, Mark Zuckerberg is laying the narrative groundwork for President-elect Trump’s planned mass deportations of people from the United States.
Multiple speech and content moderation experts 404 Media spoke to drew some parallels between these recent changes and when Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar in 2017, in which Facebook was used to spread anti-Rohingya hate and the country’s military ultimately led a campaign of murder, torture, and rape against the Muslim minority population. Although there are some key differences, Meta’s changes in the U.S. will also likely lead to the spread of more hate speech across Meta’s sites, with the real world consequences that can bring.
“We believe Meta is certainly opening up their platform to accept harmful rhetoric and mold public opinion into accepting the Trump administration's plans to deport and separate families,” Citlaly Mora, director of communications at Just Futures Law, a legal and advocacy organization focused on issues around deportation and surveillance.
“Meta knows well that hate speech can and does incite violence under certain conditions,” Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Law who previously consulted with Facebook on trust and safety issues, said. “We saw how hate speech in Myanmar inspired genocide against the Rohingya people. We have seen hateful words inspire doxing, harassment, and violence against Haitian immigrants in Ohio this fall. Meta has spent years building trust and safety teams only to tear them down.”
“Having worked with these companies for 15 years I'm devastated,” she added.
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Do you work at Meta and have documents or other material you think I should know about? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +44 20 8133 5190. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected]. Earlier this month, Zuckerberg said in a video that Meta was lifting restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that “are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” In the video he said that Meta was getting back “to its roots,” and Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new chief global affairs officer, published a write-up about the changes.
Then, The Intercept obtained a leaked document which provided examples of what sort of material would now be allowed on Meta. “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit,” “Mexican immigrants are trash!”, and “Migrants are no better than vomit,” are all examples given in the document of allowed statements on Meta. Comparisons to “filth or feces” have now been downgraded from hate speech to a less serious form of “insult,” The Intercept reported.
“ALL behavioral statements (qualified and non-qualified)” are no longer against Meta’s rules, the report said. One example was “These damn immigrants can’t be trusted, they’re all criminals.”
Susan Benesch, faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and executive director at the Dangerous Speech Project, said “Meta is opening up new space for xenophobia. Since Trump's own anti-immigrant rhetoric is full of assertions that foreigners are dangerous and malevolent, and that's why he says he wants to deport so many of them, we can expect plenty of echoes of that online.”
Trump has pledged to deport between 15 and 20 million people from the U.S. and has refused to rule out separating families, TIME reported, which conducted an interview with Trump on the topic. If carried out, such deportations could also have a massive impact on the U.S. workforce and businesses who use undocumented workers.
As for how behavior on Meta platforms might change after the company’s policy shift, Benesch said “First, some hateful content that would have been taken down will now stay up. Second, some users will post awful content to test the new regime—it's an entertaining game for many people, like kids testing limits. Third, some Trump voters are eager to see deportations begin, and now that he is days from becoming President again, they will be discussing their hopes for what he will do, and posting their reactions to what he says.”
Rebecca Hamilton, professor law at American University, added “The changes to community standards will enable more online content that vilifies immigrants. The move from third-party fact checking to community notes is likely to result in more misinformation about immigration policies and immigrant communities. Both of these developments are the foreseeable consequences of the policy changes.” Even though Meta’s policy on violence and incitement remain unchanged, Hamilton said “The trouble is that we know that online and offline environments are ‘co-constitutive’—they shape each other. So when hate speech toward a particular group is tolerated online, even though it doesn't rise to the level of direct incitement, it still starts to shift the underlying norms for what behavior is and is not acceptable towards that group in the offline space.”
And that could lead to consequences away from the screen. “When we look at the history of mass atrocities against particular groups, we always see a period where the information landscape is shaped away from recognizing the humanity of the targeted group. By letting hate speech flourish online, you enable the pre-conditions for group violence offline,” she added.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
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