Facebook does not care about you.
Facebook is ending its fact-checking programme. Its parent company, Meta, is scrapping its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies and has actively chosen to accompany this with real-world changes, such as removing tampons from men's bathrooms at its offices.
Meta's guidelines for user conduct for all three of its primary platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Threads) now basically encourage you to very specifically call the queers 'mentally ill' (and have removed the part saying you can't call anyone an 'it' for having a gender you don't like, for good measure).
Per Meta, it's now also okay to argue that women shouldn't be allowed in government. To refer to groups of people as a 'disease'. To derogatorily label groups of people as objects (trash, appliances that belong in the kitchen, etc). In addition, efforts to intentionally limit political and inflammatory content in users' feeds will be rolled back.
"We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality..."
—Meta Community Guidelines, published 7th January, 2025
As a lovely little cherry on top, Facebook's Messenger has specifically had its transgender and non-binary chat themes removed.
When corporate figurehead Mark Zuckerberg casts himself as pushing Facebook towards 'free speech' and whinges on podcasts about how governments 'forced' Facebook to censor any information about real negative side-effects of vaccines as well as active vaccine disinformation, he doesn't believe what he's saying.
When Zuck smarms (before a professional camera just-so-carefully placed and angled to feel like a webcam) about how 'changes' to his company's policies are for the betterment of the users via ending 'biased' moderation, he doesn't actually think vulnerable groups will be well-served by these changes.
Despite this, when I say that Facebook doesn't care about you (or transgender people, or 'DEI', or sexism, or racism, or-), I mean that in the most unutterably boring way possible. Zuckerberg and the majority of people working under him likely hold very few, if any, strong opinions about any of us. If they do, it is irrelevant.
After all, mostly the same people were in charge before and after Facebook's switch from deploying pride flag chat themes and temporary Pride Month post reactions to explicitly saying it is totally okay to call the transgenderites 'mentally ill' in its community guidelines.
It just became, possibly, more profitable and politically favourable. Not even definitely, but possibly.
Facebook's cancerous outgrowth, Meta, has pissed away billions of dollars on failed crypto, metaverse, and AI schemes, all desperate bids to monetize users and increase its reach into their lives. It's finally starting to see its net userbase stop growing. Its stranglehold on the very idea of family-appropriate social media is loosening.
And so it grovels, pathetically, begging at the feet of the U.S.A's incoming president for scraps of political favour.
Hell, it pulls double-shift in grovelling, also getting down on its knees before the altar of Key Metrics. It cuts factchecking because it's an expense that reduces engagement. It cuts as much moderation as it can get away with, bit by bit, because it's an expense that reduces engagement. It cuts as much social inclusion cruft as it can, because it's an expense that didn't actually increase user engagement or staff retention.
Those things that are being cut away had important and valuable effects beyond these few metrics, but whatever those effects were is unimportant. They weren't profit. They weren't metrics that looked good on the quarterly shareholder reports. Into the bin they go. Meta is cutting away all the things it was using to pretend it was a real company that hired people because they helped it provide real services, instead of, you know, just operating The Torment Nexus for profit with a workforce it despises having to actually pay.
This all may be an attempt to escape the inevitable consequences of the last decade of Meta-nee-Facebook's enshittification, but the billions of dollars that animate this shambling zombie aren't going to evaporate quickly. This could be a decade-long collapse, or worse. We all thought Twitter might fold in on itself within a year of being bought out, didn't we? No such luck here either, I'm afraid.
Whether you or I stay on these platforms isn't going to divert their course one way or the other. Things will simply get that much more rancid inside the corpse, and most of us will put up with it, because we've got shit going on there that's hard to drag elsewhere.
The best you can do is try not to take it personally. Remember: The Torment Nexus doesn't actually dislike you. It just thinks engagement numbers will be better if people like you are being fed into its maw, rather than watching from the seats.