General Discussion

But in its panicked retreat from the system it spent years building, Meta may now be putting billions of users at risk. Just because Meta deleted that line about hateful speech causing offline violence doesn't mean it isn't true. And now the company has all but declared open season on immigrants, transgender people and whatever other targets that Trump and his allies find useful in their fascist project.

"I can't tell you how much harm comes from non-illegal but harmful content," a longtime former trust and safety employee at the company told me. The classifiers that the company is now switching off meaningfully reduced the spread of hate movements on Meta's platforms, they said. "This is not the climate change debate, or pro-life vs. pro-choice. This is degrading, horrible content that leads to violence and that has the intent to harm other people."

In 2018, the United Nations found that Facebook and social media had played a key role in accelerating the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. "Facebook has been a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate, in a context where, for most users, Facebook is the Internet," the UN concluded.

The former employee I spoke with feared that whatever consequences Meta's surrender to the right on speech issues might have in the United States, its effect in the rest of the world could be even more dire. "I really think this is a precursor for genocide," they said. "We've seen it happen. Real people's lives are actually going to be endangered. I'm just devastated."