The Platforms Changed. Quietly.
Since January 2025, several major social media platforms have rolled back protections for LGBTQ users — and it’s worth knowing exactly what changed, because most of it happened without much fanfare.
Meta led the way. In January 2025, the company rewrote its community standards to allow more hostile language toward LGBTQ people and other groups — a change widely read as a move to get in step with the incoming administration. The new rules explicitly permit users to call being transgender a mental illness. They also now allow content arguing that certain jobs — military, law enforcement, teaching — should be off-limits based on gender. At the same time, Meta scaled back content moderation broadly and ended its U.S. fact-checking program.
YouTube made a smaller but telling change: it quietly removed “gender identity” from the list of protected characteristics in its hate speech policy.
GLAAD’s annual Social Media Safety Index — which tracks TikTok, YouTube, X, and Meta’s platforms — found that the political climate has shifted sharply since January 2025, with coordinated anti-LGBTQ campaigns intensifying while these platforms scaled back or eliminated safeguards for LGBTQ users. The report notes the changes echo language from Project 2025, which explicitly called for removing the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from official use.
None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened everywhere at once. It happened at specific companies, on specific dates, right after a change in Washington. That’s worth a worry.