Facebook’s parent company Meta said that two posts that included “misgendering” were not a violation of its policies, in a case that appears to have involved content from The Daily Wire.
The social media giant’s Oversight Board ruled that two posts about trans-identifying males do not violate the company’s hate speech rules.
“Despite the intentionally provocative nature of the posts, which misgender identifiable trans people in ways many would find offensive, a majority of the Board found they related to matters of public concern and would not incite likely and imminent violence or discrimination,” the Oversight Board said in a statement on the decision.
Back in September, Meta’s Oversight Board announced it was looking into two posts from last year that involve videos of trans-identifying males.
One of the posts appears to be a video posted by Libs of TikTok on Instagram that shows an Oregon high school boy getting booed by the crowd when he finished first place in the girls’ 200-meter race.
“He’s a boy who thinks he’s a girl,” Libs of TikTok captioned the post.
Around the same time, The Daily Wire posted the same video on Instagram, using male pronouns for the trans-identifying high schooler.
The other post was a video posted to Facebook showing a girl confronting a trans-identifying male in the women’s bathroom and expressing her discomfort. That video was likely taken by Payton McNabb, a female high school athlete who was seriously injured in 2022 when a trans-identifying volleyball player spiked a ball at her head.
Both posts were reported for “Hate Speech and Bullying and Harassment” multiple times, but Meta left both posts up, deciding that neither violated Meta’s Community Standards. Users who reported the posts then appealed to the Oversight Board.
However, on Wednesday, the board ruled in favor of Meta’s original decision to leave both posts up. Rulings by the Oversight Board on specific posts are considered binding for the company.
“The Hate Speech policy does not include misgendering as a form of prohibited ‘attack,’” the Oversight Board noted when it announced it was looking into the videos.
The move is the latest victory for conservative users as Meta says it is working to dial back censorship, including on gender identity.
Earlier this year, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to his company’s content moderation policies, promising “more speech and fewer mistakes.”
“In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far,” Meta said.
“We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression,” the company said.
The company also said it will be “getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate” and it will also recommend more political content if a user has indicated they are interested.
Meta has been fiercely criticized in recent years for censoring political content such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, which broke just before the 2020 election.
