Here it is:
On Red Flags
Digital Photocollage, 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan
Clothing makes us okay, as long as the clothing is pre-approved.
Who made these rules? Turns out Mark Zuckerberg did.
January 7, 2025: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces a complete overhaul of content policies across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The new policies end fact-checking, gut content moderation, and rewrite the hateful conduct policy to expressly permit abuse against LGBTQ+ people while forbidding the same abuses against all other communities. Users can now call gay people mentally ill, call for their exclusion from professions, and refer to transgender people as “it.” Leaked Meta training materials obtained by The Intercept include examples of newly permitted speech: “Gays are freaks.” That is now allowed. A shirtless gay man in a Pride crowd is not.
May 13, 2025: GLAAD releases its fifth annual Social Media Safety Index. Facebook and Instagram each score 45 out of 100. The report documents unprecedented hate speech policy rollbacks actively undermining the safety of LGBTQ+ people online and offline. The Electronic Frontier Foundation documents a surge in LGBTQ+ account takedowns, describing it as “algorithmic silencing.” Over 200 LGBTQ+ and reproductive health accounts are removed or restricted in 2025 alone — more than double the 81 documented in all of 2024. “This has been, to my knowledge, one of the biggest waves of censorship we are seeing,” said Martha Dimitratou of Repro Uncensored.
Sources
• GLAAD: Social Media Safety Index 2025
• Human Rights Campaign: Meta’s New Policies — How They Endanger LGBTQ+ Communities (2025)
• LGBTQ Nation: Meta Accused of Banning LGBTQ+ Accounts in One of Its Biggest Waves of Censorship (December 2025)
• Axios: Zuckerberg’s New Policies for Facebook and Instagram Open Door to Hate Speech (January 2025)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation / Bay Area Reporter: LGBTQ+ Censorship on Instagram Has Surged (2025)
• Prism Reports: Social Media Users Grapple With Anti-LGBTQIA+ Policy Changes (2025)
