How Mark Zuckerberg's 'Free Speech' Boost At Meta Affects Women And The LGBTQ+ Community

More changes are sweeping through Facebook and its parent company, Meta, in the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s continued alliance with Donald Trump.

On the heels of the announcement to remove the social media platform’s fact-checking system comes word of other implemented changes, both major and minor, that appear to align with a more conservative view as we inch nearer to Inauguration Day.

Users of Facebook’s Messenger feature awoke on Monday to discover the quiet removal of several special themes celebrating the LGBTQ+ community.

Color schemes designed for the transgender and non-binary communities, first implemented in 2021, were reportedly made unavailable for usage without prior notice given by the social media app.

Per Pink News, the schemes were built around hues associated with the pride flags of each community  - light blue, pink, and white for the transgender flag and yellow, white, purple, and black for the non-binary flag.

The move comes less than a week after Zuckerberg announced in a video that Meta would no longer moderate “divisive” issues, such as gender identity, sexual identity, and immigration.

Concurrently, revised notes in Meta’s guidelines following Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement state, in no uncertain terms, that social media users will be allowed to refer to those in the LGBTQ+ community as “mentally ill” simply due to being LGBTQ+.

“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation,” it partially reads, “given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”

Rules noting that terms such as “freak” or “abnormal” have also been omitted from the updated guidelines, along with punishments given to users who claim that there is “no such thing” as gay or transgender people on the site.

Other content filters for negative terms relating to women were also said to have been removed from Meta’s guidelines.

Meta insiders note that the “shift” in rules has caused “total chaos” in Meta’s roster, with several employees reportedly taking sick leave due to “being mentally ill and LBGTQ+.”

In his announcement to Meta and Facebook on January 7, Zuckerberg alleged, among other things, that fact-checking had become “too politically biased” over the years.

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” he specified. “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created.”

Hoping to return to Meta’s “roots,” Zuckerberg aimed to drop fact-checkers from Facebook in favor of community notes, similar to the practice employed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk – a staunch Trump ally – on X (fka Twitter).

“[Community notes have helped to] empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading,” Zuckerberg said of X, adding that bringing the practice to Meta would assist in “[getting] rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, which are out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

A Meta oversight board member went on record to claim that Zuckerberg failed to share his guideline revision plans with Meta employees – but kept Trump in the loop the entire time.

Michael McConnell, a law professor at Stanford, appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” last Friday, and listeners that no one on the board was aware of the “troubling” changes coming to the company.

“This actually came as a surprise to us. We did not know that they were going to be revising that standard,” McConnell said.

Inversely, Sen. Markwayne Mullin told political commentator Benny Johnson last week that Zuckerberg met with Trump at least 24 hours before announcing the revisions to inform him directly.

“Mark met with President Trump the day before he announced that [and] spoke about that [with Trump],” he noted, adding that “Mark had been down to see the president several times already.”

GLAAD CEO and President Sarah Kate Ellis noted in a press release that Zuckerberg’s new guidelines for Meta came a week after the termination of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.

As such, Ellis sees a bleak future for both users and employees of Meta and its services.

“The company’s litany of dangerous actions is unprecedented. In one week, they have dismantled an entire history of brand-safety best practices, consumer trust, and most importantly, user safety,” Ellis wrote. “These changes will harm users and make Meta’s platforms unsafe for everyone. Meta is now an anti-LGBTQ company."