“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”

Unbridled hate speech is now allowed on Meta’s platform of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The awful title of this post comes directly from new Meta training materials as an example of an acceptable statement on the platform. Other disturbing examples are highlighted throughout The Intercept’s article on Meta’s new rules—or lack thereof—on content moderation. In short, there aren’t many rules anymore. Hate speech and shockingly derogatory remarks are now free from moderation.

Meta’s Public Community Standards page says that even under the new relaxed rules, the company still protects “refugees, migrants, immigrants, and asylum seekers from the most severe attacks” and prohibits “direct attacks” against people on the basis of “race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, and serious disease.” But the instructive examples provided in the internal materials show a wide variety of comments denigrating people based on these traits that are marked “Allow.”

There are exceptions but good luck trying to make any sense of the fine line between acceptable and not acceptable. 

At times, the provided examples appear convoluted or contradictory. One page notes “generalizations” about any group remain prohibited if they make a comparison to animals or pathogens — such as “All Syrian refugees are rodents.” But comparisons to “filth or feces” are now downgraded from hate speech to a less serious form of “insult,” which violates company rules only if directed at a protected group. According to examples provided by Meta, this change now allows users to broadly dehumanize immigrants with statements like like “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit,” despite language elsewhere in the document that claims “comparisons to subhumanity” remain banned.

None of this is acceptable in any way, shape, or form. I don’t care about First Amendment rights—there’s no place for this rhetoric anywhere. You would think Meta would have learned its lesson in 2020, but here we are. Likely a sign of more hateshit to come in the next four years.

I should have known better than to hop on the Threads bandwagon when so many others were doing the same. I deleted my Instagram account four years ago for the same reasons advertisers fled the platform. It wasn’t a decision I made lightly—I loved the photography-sharing community—but it was the right thing to do.

Without hesitation, I deleted my accounts this morning after reading about Meta’s actions to support hate speech. (Meta requires an Instagram account to use Threads, and you have to delete both through separate steps.) I won’t be back, and I encourage everyone to do the same.

I know how hard it is to leave a community and give up that dopamine hit of instant connection with friends and followers. I haven’t yet found a suitable replacement for the community I was part of on Instagram, but you can’t claim to be against hate while using the largest social platform that just opened its doors to amplify all of it to the world.