I’m still shaken by this, two days later.
It’s not a mistake or some kind of ambiguous rule that could be misread. Following is the direct quote from Meta’s new guidelines. You can’t insult people based on:
Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”
They’re carving out specific minorities to exclude them from protections afforded to everybody else.
It’s exactly like saying: “You can’t doxx anyone on our platform, except Jews because that’s political and religious discourse about where heathens live.”
So here we are in 2025, and this barely gets a mention in the press because they’re so overwhelmed by the president-elect pretending to invade Denmark and whatever.
I’m a middle-aged bisexual man. My childhood and early teenage years coincided with the darkest times of the HIV epidemic. At 13 I was deadly afraid of AIDS, and I’m still trying to overcome the internalized homophobia from those times. For years I just tried to blend in, dated women, eventually got married, had children. I thought society had made real progress, but now it’s starting to dawn on me that it’s a mirage like Roe vs Wade or 1920s Berlin, and it can be stripped away at any time. And I feel like a miserable coward for all these years “just minding my own business” and never stepping up to support the community in any way, letting somebody else do the work. That needs to change. I’ll rather be mentally ill than hide in the shadows.