Meta's new hate speech rules — or lack thereof — now allow users to make shockingly misogynistic claims on the company's social networks.

A perusal of the latest update to Meta's "hateful conduct" rules reveals that a number of rules that barred users from comparing minorities to inanimate objects, including references to "women as household objects or property," have been removed.

As part of the tech company's transparency efforts, users are able not only to see updates to policies, but also a change log of what had been added and stricken out between updates.

For its January 7, 2025 update — which went into effect seemingly just after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday a sweeping content overhaul that was derided as a clear effort to curry favor with president-elect Donald Trump — Meta's confusing new rules strike out a number of formerly prohibited types of speech, much of which relates to women and gender minorities.

Among the strikethroughs in the "hateful conduct" policy change log is the removal of a section barring users from comparing people to inanimate objects or "non-human states." That rule, now rescinded, banned referring to women "as household objects or property or objects in general."

You don't have to a be a scholar in feminist theory to know why it's seriously messed up to refer to a woman as someone else's property — and that's without getting into the history of chattel slavery in the United States, when white men owned and abused Black women for hundreds of years.

In the age of Trump 2.0, the concept of a man "owning" a woman is a logical — and terrifying — endpoint of the so-called "trad wife" movement, which seeks to reinstate traditional gender roles by will or by force. It's also the undercurrent of the anti-choice push that the president-elect's cronies hope to enact further once he takes office again in a few weeks.

That same regressive and misogynistic energy also seems to be on display in another peculiar removal from Meta's new hateful conduct policy.

While the policy used to ban "generalizations that state inferiority" based on physical appearance and sexual activity — like calling people "slut," "whore," or "pervert," per the old rules — the new overhaul now simply prohibits "insults" about character.

Though the new update added language saying that users should not post allegations about another person's "sexual promiscuity or other sexual immorality," it's unclear what the difference between that addition and the exclusion of the "slut" and "whore" language would be, and we've reached out to Meta for clarification about that.

Within the context of Zuckerberg's newfound Trump fandom, meanwhile, this policy overhaul feels very much like the "grab 'em by the pussy"-era misogyny of the president-elect's 2016 campaign — and Meta has a lot of explaining to do if it wants the women who use its platforms to believe any different.

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