Meta has been making headlines ever since the tech giant announced that it would abandon its fact-checking programme and update its hateful conduct policy to mitigate “censorship” and further free speech. Hurray—at least for hateful trolls online, because they seem to be the ones mainly benefiting from these new policies. Next to calling queer and trans individuals mentally ill, these users will now also be allowed to compare women to household objects. What a brave, new, and scary age we’re living in.

After Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the company would be turning to community notes to address false information, adding context to misleading posts rather than deleting misinformative claims, the company is now revamping what it defines as hateful speech.

“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations,” a company statement read.

With these new changes, the platform will now permit users to refer to “transgender or non-binary people as ‘it’, a new pronoun that is more than just lightly dehumanising.

A new section of the policy also notes Meta will allow “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.”

And to place the cherry on top, users will now be allowed to refer to women as “household objects or property.” Some netizens likened this decision to creating an environment similar to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Did I hear anyone say Project 2025?

The company also removed prohibitions against statements denying the existence of “protected” groups, such as statements that a certain group of people doesn’t or shouldn’t exist. The policy also now allows for content arguing in favour of “gender-based limitations of the military, law enforcement, and teaching jobs.”

Next to this, language targeting people based on their “protected characteristics,” such as race, ethnicity, and gender identity, when they are combined with “claims that they have or spread the coronavirus,” will now be perfectly acceptable. So to clarify, with this new change it may now be within bounds to accuse Chinese people, for example, of bearing responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic, or reinforce racial stereotypes that minorities have been spreading the virus because they are ‘unclean’ and ‘unwashed’.

Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss told WIRED that its restrictions will be loosened globally.

In anticipation of the backlash, company head Zuckerberg acknowledged that this new approach would mean “that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Still, many netizens interpreted this new change as a legalisation of abuse towards women and the LGBTQAI+ community on Meta platforms, in order to please a new far-right government.

Facebook “also quietly updated its hateful conduct policy, adding new types of content users can post on the platform, effective immediately.
Users are now allowed to, for example, refer to “women as household objects or property” or “transgender or non-binary people as ‘it,’” pic.twitter.com/440E3IXNKT

— Paul Kingsley (@PaulKingsley7) January 8, 2025

Calling women “household objects” now permitted on Facebook after Meta updated their guidelines.

This is what the war on women looks like. pic.twitter.com/jOzD1XJQ2S

— Vanessa Simone 🇨🇦 (@Vanessa_Sarges) January 8, 2025

Tuned in to Majority Report at the moment Emma was saying Meta’s speech policies now permit for calling women household objects (I think that’s what she said? Some kind of object). Very cool! pic.twitter.com/KlGP3pwCUB

— @luxeprogressive.bsky.social (@luxeprogressive) January 8, 2025

Meta’s changes come as the conglomerate is trying to curry favour with Donald Trump and other Republican leaders ahead of the president-elect’s second term. The changes echo a response to longstanding conservative criticisms that Meta has been unfairly “censoring” right-wing voices to push a liberal agenda and politics on its platforms.