'It's Total Chaos Internally at Meta Right Now': Employees Protest Zuckerberg's Anti LGBTQ Changes [View all]

Source: 404 Media

Meta employees are furious with the company’s newly announced content moderation changes that will allow users to say that LGBTQ+ people have “mental illness,” according to internal conversations obtained by 404 Media and interviews with five current employees. The changes were part of a larger shift Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday to do far less content moderation on Meta platforms.

“I am LGBT and Mentally Ill,” one post by an employee on an internal Meta platform called Workplace reads. “Just to let you know that I’ll be taking time out to look after my mental health.”

On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be getting “back to our roots around free expression” to allow “more speech and fewer mistakes.” The company said “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.” A review of Meta’s official content moderation policies show, specifically, that some of the only substantive changes to the policy were made to specifically allow for “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.” It has long been known that being LGBTQ+ is not a sign of “mental illness,” and the false idea that sexuality or gender identification is a mental illness has long been used to stigmatize and discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.

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Another thread on Meta’s internal Workplace site that has several hundred comments and more than a thousand reactions reads “[feedback] Sexual Orientation and Gender as a mental illness … I’d appreciate some more detail on: How the decision was made to update the policy, particularly given this does not reflect any mainstream scientific consensus; How the policy reflects our values and perspectives as a company, and whether these are different to the values we’ve expressed in the past; Who (if any) LGBT groups [internal or external] were consulted as part of this change.”

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Read more: https://www.404media.co/its-total-chaos-internally-at-meta-right-now-employees-protest-zuckerbergs-anti-lgbtq-changes/