A Yet Coarser Free Speech

Terry Schwadron
4 min readJan 14, 2025

Terry H. Schwadron

Jan. 14, 2025

Well beyond the announced policy to withdraw fact-checking on social media, the changes being adopted on Meta platforms like Instagram and Facebook are inviting much coarser speech about one another and about contentious social issues without much reference to truth or decency.

Internal documents disclose a concerted effort to loosen restrictions on how people will be able to talk yet more crudely about immigration, gender and sexuality, insert more partisan political content into people’s social media feeds and block truth statements from its own moderators. From Meta’s statements, it all stresses a rather vague concept of “masculinity” into the management of its information businesses.

According to The New York Times and The Intercept, whose reporters talked with a dozen Meta unnamed insiders, Meta officials spent six weeks turning a change in policy about withdrawal of fact-checking into a practical guide for what kind of remarks will be allowed or even encouraged. The changes, which also include Meta decisions to dump “woke” programs like diversity and inclusion in hiring or content management, coincide with messages of partisan approval from incoming Donald Trump and condemnation as “shameful” from outgoing Joe Biden.

Quite apart from whatever drives Mark Zuckerberg, Meta owner and the globe’s third richest individual, what is noteworthy here are the changes in outlook and attitude that purport to reflect our times and values. Zuckerberg openly says the need for the changes are motivated by Trump’s return. With pending Justice Department antitrust actions, Zuckerberg has business and political reasons to avoid aggressive pushback from an administration that promises to punish partisan enemies who criticize or cross Trump. But Zuckerberg is reflecting a wider desire in Big Tech, corporate America and beyond to curry favor with the values that accompany the arrival of Trump and MAGA to power.

In interviews with the Joe Rogan podcast and Fox, Zuckerberg is promoting a free speech policy that is fact-resistant, that depends on viewer reaction and that celebrates more “ masculine energy” in corporations to push back against “culturally neutered” values. For myself, it is difficult to understand equating disinformation and coarseness with masculinity and rejecting inclusion in hiring, but it seems to ring for the anti-woke among us.

It’s free speech with no responsibility, freedom to trash others without empathy for a show of power.

From Inside Meta

The internal documents, drafted after conversations with several conservative social media influencers, changed to Meta’s “Hate Speech” policy, which required fact-checking and standards, with “Hateful Conduct,” which apparently requires neither going forward nor looks at conduct.

Among its changes, The Times reported, Meta loosened rules so people could post statements saying they hated people of certain races, religions or sexual orientations, including permitting “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.” The documents cite political discourse about transgender rights for the change. It also removed a rule that had forbidden users to say people of certain races were responsible for spreading the coronavirus.

The Intercept published excerpts of training guidelines for the new policies in which specific derogatory personal remarks were listed as okay to say about immigrants, gays or even minors who identify as transgender.

Critics inside Meta have noted discrepancies. Saying that “white people have mental illness” would be prohibited on Facebook but saying that “gay people have mental illness” was allowed, two critics said of the guidance documents. The company’s internal emails are throbbing with upset from employees, including from a gay alliance. Several key resignations have followed.

The ‘Masculinity’ Question

Oddly, until 2022, the chief operating officer of Meta was Sheryl Sandberg, who wrote “Lean In” as a call for more women to change the operating attitudes in corporate suites in exactly the opposite direction that Zuckerberg, an apparent new convert to MAGA principles, is expressing. Whatever else she did or promoted, she was aggressive in pursuing profits for Facebook and Instagram, which has raked in the results.

Are we to conclude now that aggressiveness about profit is not what is meant now by “masculine energy”?

I’d have thought that stretching ‘masculinity’ beyond biological definition would involve a certain courage for standing up for truth, for using power to persuade rather than bully, for being accountable. Those all seem at odds with the societal definitions now promoted by MAGA.

What exactly is it about masculinity — the darling cause promoted by Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Trump himself — that justifies personal opinion over fact and rude public remarks about whatever groups they choose not to like personally? Or is it the other way around, and we should celebrate a MAGA world in which hateful remarks and actions are to be venerated, and any attempt to dilute pure public bile is considered un-masculine?

Does our masculinity depend solely on our public ability or desire to trash others? Is this why we have Cabinet nominees like Defense appointee Pete Hegseth with a history sexual assault claims who see the main problem in national defense as the gender of who is holding a weapon?

We have elected a Trump who can only feel completed by undercutting everyone around him, whether it is firefighters and officials battling an epic set of simultaneous urban wildfires in Los Angeles or a judge who oversees a jury trial in a procedure that Trump detests. His ‘masculinity’ seems a desire to be freed from any societal rules, protocols or law.

That concept wasn’t on the ballot in November, despite Democrats’ desires that it should be. We had a narrow majority vote for Trump over unhappiness about prices and immigration policies, not over rude coarseness.

Even before inauguration, Trump has conceded he will do little about prices. But in sweeping promises to takeover Greenland, Panama, Canada, in summary dismissals of diversity and inclusion, in constant swipes at systems of science, law, environment and even middle-class taxes, he already has a building presidential record of crudeness to salve his manhood issues.

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www.terryschwadron.wordpress.com

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Terry Schwadron
Terry Schwadron

Written by Terry Schwadron

Journalist, musician, community volunteer

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