Outward | Meta’s New Rules: Embracing Homophobic and Transphobic Hate Speech

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Slate Podcasts

News Commentary, Politics, News

4.5 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Host Christina Cauterucci sits down with WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs to unpack Meta’s alarming internal shifts, including its embrace of right-wing ideologies, the elimination of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, and the policy changes that permit hate speech against gay and trans people. Together, they discuss why these changes are happening, how they align with broader political trends, and what it all signals about the future of tech, media, and LGBTQ+ rights Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	What kind of weekend are you in the mood for?
0:03.0	Well, with Disney Plus, anything is possible.
0:06.0	Whether that be two days of twists and turns with only murders in the building,
0:11.0	drama and fine dining with The Bear,
0:13.0	or a journey back to feudal Japan with Shogun.
0:17.0	January weekends just got better with Disney Plus.
0:20.0	Tap the banner to learn more. 18 plus subscription required. Learn better with Disney Plus. Tap the banner to learn more.
0:22.1	18 plus subscription required.
0:24.0	Learn more at Disneyplus.com. Hello and welcome to Outward, Slate's podcast about queer culture, politics, and everything else rattling around in our pretty little heads.
0:51.5	I'm Christina Cotarucci, a senior writer at Slate.
0:56.5	And this week, I want to talk about something that's kind of been keeping me up at night. You might have actually seen this
1:01.7	news already. Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, recently rolled out a whole
1:08.7	slew of changes to its policies, basically reducing the types of
1:12.9	content that the company will moderate on his platforms. So that means some things that used to get
1:18.6	your post deleted on Facebook or Insta are now fair game, including some hate speech about
1:24.7	queer and trans people. So according to the guidelines that Meta sent out
1:29.5	to employees, content moderators will no longer flag posts that say things like, and these are
1:35.8	the company's own examples, trans people aren't real, they're mentally ill, gays are not normal.
1:42.9	A trans woman isn't a woman, it's a pathetic, confused man. A trans person isn't a he or a she. It's an it. And the most common transphobic slur is no longer prohibited either. Now, it's no coincidence that this all came down just weeks before Donald Trump takes office.
2:02.2	Mark Zuckerberg, the META CEO, and other tech leaders are falling all over themselves to curry favor with the new president and align themselves and their companies with his ideological agenda.
2:14.5	So here to help me think through all this is Kate Nibbs, a senior writer at Wired,
2:19.4	who wrote a great piece about Mehta's new policies, and we'll get into that after the break.
	...

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