Since the November election Mark Zuckerberg has been firmly in Donald Trump’s corner, so it comes as no surprise that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, has quietly switched sides when it comes to anti-trans speech on its platforms.
Last week, the company’s Oversight Board upheld an earlier decision to allow anti-trans speech, such as the previously banned slur “tranny,” a move that rang alarm bells at GLAAD and among other LGBTQ activists and actors. (Under Elon Musk’s guidance, X removed protections around anti-trans language two years ago.)
In late April, the board reviewed rulings on two videos, one on Facebook in which a transgender woman is confronted for using the women’s bathroom at a university, which featured the caption “male student who thinks he’s a girl.” Meta found no violations.
A second video of a transgender girl winning a track race, which was shared to Instagram, was captioned “boy who thinks he’s a girl,” was reported by one Meta user but also deemed not to violate community standards. Both rulings were appealed, with the board agreeing to let the speech stand.
“Meta’s decision sends a dangerous message that the voices and well-being of trans people are not worth protecting,” Ash Lazarus Orr, Press Relations Manager at Advocates for Trans Equality, told TheWrap.
“CIS folks should be extremely concerned, particularly women, because of the way that Meta has greenlit specific abuses that were previously banned,” said trans activist and civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo. “Now women can be referred to as property. A lot of these protections essentially are about whether society is willing to [stomach] horrific bigotry,” Caraballo told TheWrap in an interview.
“Obviously trans people and immigrants are the most vulnerable right now. We’re the testing grounds for how they’re going to implement this on the broader population,” Caraballo, who teaches at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic continued. “If they’re shown to back down on communities that they’ve historically protected, there’s no bottom of the barrel where they’re going to stop.”
Grading Facebook: an “F” for safety
Meta rewrote its guidelines in January to avoid putting anyone who shares an anti-trans post in “Facebook jail” and to “return to that fundamental commitment to free expression.” In denying the appeals, “the majority of the Board found there was not enough of a link between restricting these posts and preventing harm to transgender people, with neither creating a likely or imminent risk of incitement to violence.”
GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement in January. “This is not ‘free speech,’ this is harassment that dehumanizes a vulnerable group of people” and said that these new policies “endanger LGBTQ people.”
For the last four years, the advocacy group has issued a Social Media Safety Index that gives a letter grade to platforms. For 2024, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Threads and X all received a grade of F, while TikTok earned only a slightly better D+.
Last year, GLAAD president Ellis wrote, “America is at a critical juncture when it comes to LGBTQ acceptance and safety. We have record-high support for LGBTQ equality, yet we live in an unsafe America for LGBTQ people, especially for transgender people.”
How social media has become more dangerous
“Anti-Trans and anti-LGBTQ+ messages are not new, and posts including this content have only proliferated on social media. In fact, social media platforms have only magnified and expanded pre-existing hate to those susceptible to their content,” Julianna Kirschner, a Ph.D., Lecturer at USC Annenberg told TheWrap.
She added that allowing transphobic messaging “only emboldens users who are already predisposed to compose and circulate messaging like this.” She noted, “When Elon Musk took over Twitter, now X, use of the N-word increased by over 500%. Users were merely testing the waters, and the platform has not been the same ever since.”
Trans activist and journalist Imara Jones told TheWrap that, over the last decade, “These platforms got even better at understanding their power, they got better at defining algorithms. They’ve gotten more dangerous over time, but you could see that that power was always there from the beginning.” She mentioned historic moments like the Arab Spring in 2010 in which Twitter played a pivotal part in connecting people protesting corrupt governments.
“I don’t think a lot of people are as aware or outraged about this as they should be, because I think most people are still under the impression that this does not affect them. – Nicole Maines
“These platforms can cause real world destruction on a massive scale,” Jones told TheWrap, citing the 2024 United Kingdom riots that occurred after the stabbing deaths of three children. Online disinformation about the suspect led to racist attacks on immigrants as well as arson and looting. The week-long chaos was driven, in part, by Elon Musk’s declarations on X that “civil war” in the UK was “inevitable.”
At the time, Prime Minister Keir Starmer slammed Musk for fanning the flames: “Let me also say to large social media companies and those who run them: Violent disorder, clearly whipped up online, that is also a crime,” he said in a televised address in August 2024.
Likewise, Caraballo referenced the 2017 massacre by Myanmar military against the Rohingya people, which, Amnesty International found in 2022, was fueled in part by unchecked hatred on Facebook.
The fear is that online hate speech will lead, as it so often has, to real-world violence. “Online abuse doesn’t stay online,” trans writer Leah Juliett stated in a sobering Mashable essay this week. Videos like those deemed harmless by Meta “strip trans people of dignity, spread dangerous misinformation, and fuel the kind of hate that has real, violent consequences,” they wrote.
Juliette linked to disturbing stats, including the Human Rights Campaign announcing its first-ever state of emergency in 2023 for queer people in the US and its report that 36 trans women were murdered in the country in 2024, up from 33 the previous year.
X is the “most dangerous” platform, Bluesky the safest
Jones told TheWrap, that for the trans community, “We all know that the most dangerous platform is Twitter,” and that Facebook has felt exponentially less safe since anti-trans posts were no longer deemed to be harmful.
“Bluesky is definitely much better, because it isn’t a receptive space for trolls and for people who wish to do others harm in that way,” said Jones. While Bluesky did not respond to TheWrap for this article, one of their stated policies is “treat others with respect” and that “harassment or abuse directed at a specific person or group, including but not limited to, sexual harassment and gender identity-based harassment” is not allowed.
“The good news is, that there are more and more spaces online that we are carving out for ourselves where we can share cat videos and bad dad jokes like we want to,” said “Yellowjackets” actress Nicole Maines, urging fans to follow her on BlueSky.
Lazarus Orr of Advocates for Trans Equality added that keeping anti-trans messages online “enables the normalization of violence, discrimination, and hate, making it more difficult for marginalized individuals to feel safe, heard, and respected.”
They cited GLAAD’s 2022 report, which found that 84% of LGBTQ adults feel that current social media protections don’t do enough to prevent discrimination, harassment, and disinformation. The report also found that 49% of trans and nonbinary people don’t feel safe or welcome on social media platforms.
“I don’t think a lot of people are as aware or outraged about this as they should be, because I think most people are still under the impression that this does not affect them,” said Maines.
She added, “These platforms have a responsibility to put their users first, and look out for their best interest, and that has been very clearly not the case when it comes to social media, especially in recent years as far right ideology continues to steamroll out of control.”
Jones isn’t optimistic that social media spaces will become any safer for trans people any time soon. “It’s going to get much worse,” she predicted.
