Meta’s New Hate Speech Rules To Impact Creators And Their Communities

Analysts and civil rights advocates have raised concern about how Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to dismantle Meta’s fact-checking program could disrupt advertising economies, digital labor markets and broader democratic discourse.

In recent months, Meta has sought to woo creators with bonus incentives and flashy AI tools, seemingly positioning itself to benefit from a creator influx following the pending TikTok ban. The full impact of Meta’s X-inspired “community management” approach to moderation remains to be seen, but social media creators across Meta properties are likely to feel this shift acutely.

For underrepresented creators, the shift means greater risk within an already-precarious career economy.

Playing By Platform Rules

Creators’ dependence on Meta’s platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Threads – means they are vigilant about adhering to the companies’ community standards, which delineate violent, deceptive, sexually exploitative and otherwise prohibited content. But these rules are far from clear and unevenly applied.

Here, Zuckerberg’s admission that Meta’s moderation systems sometimes get it “wrong” rings true. As noted in Meta’s Tuesday announcement, “Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do.” Creators report many punitive errors—an ankle erroneously flagged as “nudity” or a joke about “kidnapping a book” interpreted as child endangerment.

Many creators I’ve interviewed over the years have experienced what they describe as unjust punishment. As a social media personality with four million followers told me after her Instagram account was banned for alleged over sexualized content: “The losses were devastating. Tearful. Emotional. Scary. Because you’re like, ‘I’ve become invisible.’” For those able to successfully monetize their accounts, the emotional damage is of course accompanied by financial losses.

But if over-censorship is a concern for creators, a far greater risk — especially for marginalized communities — is an independent career within a no-holds-barred internet. During my research, I’ve heard accounts of identity-based harassment, trolling, doxing and threats. Worse still, creators report that platform systems place them on “the wrong side of the algorithm” — a phrase used to describe exposure to antagonistic audiences.

Meta’s proposed solution to such harms is a robust reliance on its community to report violations. To be sure, shared systems of volunteer governance harbor the potential to manage “social relations, conflict, and civil liberties online,” as my colleague J. Nathan Matias wrote in a 2019 study of reddit. But given how few shared cultural norms exist across Meta’s diverse communities or creators, this approach seems unlikely to work in practice.

One probable outcome is that creators will engage in self-censorship. Given how often marginalized creators already face sexist, racist and/or transphobic language, Meta’s removal of guidelines for sensitive issues such as gender or immigration is especially alarming. Wired reported on recent changes to the “Hateful Conduct” policy, including the statement: “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.”

Also likely is an uptick in mass reports, wherein users flood the reporting system with complaints, aiming to have the targeted creator’s content removed. This would open the sluice gates for strategic attacks—much like the “organized flagging” of groups expressing political discontent.

To be sure, visibility warfare is already rife in the creator economy. As one Instagram cosplay creator shared with me, “If someone posts a video and a bunch of community trolls don’t like it…they mass report that creator [and] their stuff gets taken down when nothing that they were saying was going against any of our community guidelines.” What Colten Meisner, assistant professor at North Carolina State University, describes as “weaponized platform governance” is particularly problematic for creators advocating for marginalized communities—such as people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, and those with disabilities.

If the most vulnerable creators are forced to self-censor, their privileged counterparts may be incentivized to create more sensationalized content. We can thus expect to see a surge in so-called rage bait; that is, content intentionally designed to incite the ire of audiences. Rage-baiting attests to “no such thing as bad publicity” attention logics. And there’s something of a science to the tactic, as studies of emotional contagion make clear.

Another Adpocalypse?

The wildcard, of course, is how Meta’s moderation overhaul will affect advertising deals within a sprawling creator economy. As media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan reminded yesterday in a critique of Zuckerberg, “No reputable company wants its product or service placed next to a gruesome image of sexual exploitation, violence or bigotry.” Is another Adpocalypse – wherein advertisers withdraw funding en masse – on the horizon?

As creators continue to expand their influence in news and politics — the 2024 Presidential campaign was even dubbed the “influencer election” — the consequences of these changes deserve careful reflection.

Not only do they impact the livelihoods of a professional class of creators only beginning to establish labor and legal structures, but they also shape the mainstream attention agendas of anyone who relies on them for advice, information and entertainment. What Meta – and X, for that matter – frame as radical free speech is likely to entrench inequalities within the creator economy.