Descrição do caso
These two cases concern content decisions made by Meta, on Facebook and Instagram, which the Oversight Board intends to address together.
In the first case, a Facebook user in the United States posted a video of a woman confronting a transgender woman for using the women’s bathroom. The post refers to the person being confronted as a man and asks why it is permitted for them to use a women’s bathroom.
In the second case, an Instagram account posted a video of a transgender girl winning a female sports competition in the United States, with some spectators vocally disapproving of the result. The post refers to the athlete as a boy, questioning whether they are female.
Both posts were shared in 2024 and received thousands of views and reactions. They were reported for Hate Speech and Bullying and Harassment multiple times, but Meta left both posts up on Facebook and Instagram, respectively. After appealing to Meta against the company’s decisions, two of the users who reported the content then appealed to the Oversight Board.
Following the Board’s selection of these cases, Meta considered both posts under its Hate Speech and Bullying and Harassment policies and concluded that neither violated its Community Standards. Both posts remained up. Meta’s Hate Speech Community Standard prohibits direct attacks targeting a person or group of people on the basis of protected characteristics, including sex, gender identity and sexual orientation, with “exclusion or segregation in the form of calls for action, statements of intent, aspirational or conditional statements, or statements advocating or supporting [exclusion].” The Hate Speech policy does not include misgendering as a form of prohibited “attack.” Misgendering means referring to a person using a word, especially a pronoun or the way in which they are addressed, that does not reflect their gender identity. Meta informed the Board that neither post violated its Hate Speech policy, adding that even if the post in the first case could constitute a call for exclusion, it would still be kept up under the newsworthiness allowance, given “transgender people’s access to bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity is the subject of considerable political debate in the United States.”
Meta’s Bullying and Harassment Community Standard prohibits “cognizable attacks and calls for exclusion” targeted at a private minor, private adult (if reported by the targeted person) or an involuntary public figure who is a minor (including statements advocating or supporting exclusion of a person). The public-facing language of the Bullying and Harassment policy does not consider misgendering a person to be a cognizable attack or call for exclusion. Meta informed the Board that the content in the first case did not violate the Bullying and Harassment policy as there was “no explicit call for exclusion present in the post and because the post was not self-reported by the person depicted in the video.” The company stated that although the second post targeted a minor who Meta considers to be an involuntary public figure, it did not contain a “cognizable attack or call for exclusion” so did not violate this Community Standard. Meta explained that the company allows “more discussion and debate around public figures in part because – as here – these conversations are often part of social and political debates and the subject of news reporting.”
In their statement to the Board, the user who appealed the post in the first case explained that Meta allowed what in their view is a transphobic post to stay on its platform. The user who appealed the post in the second case said that the post attacks and harasses the athlete with language that in their view violates Meta’s Community Standards.
The Board selected these cases to assess whether Meta’s approach to moderating discussions around gender identity respects users’ freedom of expression and the rights of transgender and non-binary people. The cases fall within the Board’s Hate Speech Against Marginalized Groups and Gender strategic priorities.
The Board would appreciate public comments that address:
- The impacts of Meta’s Hate Speech and Bullying and Harassment policies on freedom of expression around gender identity issues, and the rights of transgender people, including minors.
- Technical challenges in enforcing bullying and harassment policies at scale, the effectiveness of self-reporting requirements and their impacts on people targeted by bullying or harassment, and comparisons to alternative enforcement approaches.
- The sociopolitical context in the United States concerning freedom of expression and the rights of transgender people, especially for access to single-sex spaces and participation in sporting events.
As part of its decisions, the Board can issue policy recommendations to Meta. While recommendations are not binding, Meta must respond to them within 60 days. As such, the Board welcomes public comments proposing recommendations that are relevant to these cases.
Comentários
Gender Identity and Sex are different.
To privilege the language of one while labeling the language of the other as hate speech is clearly biased. The rights of women and girls to use the language that affirms their biological reality and experience is essential should be protected.
Real harm is being done to women and girls in this public square if they are unable to partake in dialogue to protect their safety and opportunities using everyday, mainstream and science-based language.
A “tranwoman” is biologically male.
If that fact is hurtful to someone claiming that identity, that hurt is within their own psychological domain. How someone internally responds to fact and science based language is not in the purview of any other person.
Violating the sacred free speech rights of a good faith participant simply because she/he uses fact-based language is clearly an overreach.
Thank you for listening.
There is no shame in stating material, objective reality. We also have a right to free speech. Stating the truth of biological sex isn’t hateful. Not allowing people, especially women, to state who our oppressors, men, are is an act of violence and oppression.
Sports: We separate men and women into categories because we want women to be able to win some competitions. There is a 10% to 12% difference between male and female athletic performance.
Public and professional life: We separate men and women into categories because we want women to be able to go about there lives in a world with increasing levels of VAWG's as safely as possible. For any man to break these once agreed upon boundaries in women's spaces - reserved for privacy, dignity, community and security - and to do so with the support of govts, media, institutions - all of whom enforce their ideological beliefs onto us grotesque gaslighing and coercive fashion - is removing women's rights to a full life.
Children: To teach children that this ideological framework is not only true but the right way - that the natural exploration during childhood development is actually a misplaced gender identity - is pure abuse. We know now that medicalising children on this basis is harmful and can be devestating to their future fertility and sexual function, let alone psychologically destabilising .
Forcing girls to accept boys into their sports, toilets, changing rooms, etc while ignoring the glaring risks to their safety - and to their education regards personal boundaries and consent - is abuse. It diminishes all females lived experience as one half of the same species (the half without the right to choose, to say no, to express genuine discomfort and distress - all of which are now reclassed as bigotry).
Overall, if you remove the right of females to discuss our biology, our reality, our concerns and anxieties of the grounds that some men might not like the facts of evolution, biology and the very real differences between us (male pattern criminality, for example), then you prove yourselves to be biased, ideologically and politically; even suggesting this action. To block our rights to free speech on the basis of our sex, and outlawing our NEED to discuss our sexed experiences as females, including pointing out where men who say they are women use this twisted, contested and unevidenced ideology to defend their all too often colonising and abusive behaviours towards women, is sexism. And it is pure misogyny.
I would be extremely disturbed by a Meta decision to disallow users’ use of sex based pronouns, no matter the context. The debate about gender ideology is raging in The United States and beyond. Activist claims of hate speech when one uses a sex based pronoun with which they do not agree are an attempt to shut down debate about a topic that is permeating every aspect of our societies. The prohibition of sex pronouns on social media platforms would have a treacherous impact. We would no longer be able to accurately describe and discuss issues of biological men participating in female sports. Nor would we be able to expose the issues of biological men in women’s prisons. Experts in evolutionary biology would no longer be able to explain the science that underpins our physical existence! The free discussion of ideas is the cornerstone of a liberal democracy like the one we enjoy in the United States. Ideologues who wish to ban speech that they deem “hateful” are threatening our right to free speech…the very thing that makes our country a beacon of hope around the world. Ironically, the same people who wish to label sex-based pronouns as “hateful” are able to spew misogynist slurs and incite violence against women with which they disagree on Meta’s platforms.
Humans cannot change sex. Regardless of what a person believes about themselves, or however strongly they believe it, anyone born a man remains a man all their lives. They will also usually be recognisable to everyone they meet, as male. They will generally display typical male behaviour: male entitlement, male sexuality, male violence.
Sex matters.
You may believe it is somehow "unkind" to mention a male person's maleness, but you don't have the right to police everyone's speech, trying to suppress the truth. And you will fail anyway, because everyone in the room knows that that man is a man.
You have been engaging in a violation of free speech, in the service of a group which seeks to put male rapists and murderers in prison cells with women, and after release, give them access to women's toilets, women's hostels. In the service of people who want to castrate children, in the service of people who cheer male a MMA fighter smashing a woman's skull. The consequences of pretending men can be women are horrific to women. And you have been facilitating this. It's time you asked yourselves: "are we the baddies?
Women’s Declaration International (WDI) is a global, nonpartisan group of volunteer women dedicated to protecting women’s sex-based rights. WDI USA is its U.S. chapter.
The Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights (the Declaration) was created to lobby nations to protect women and girls on the basis of sex rather than “gender” or “gender identity,” based on well-established principles of international law.
Article 1 of the Declaration reaffirms that the rights of women and girls are based on the category of sex. The inclusion of “gender identity” in a legal definition of sex necessarily replaces sex with “gender identity,” a claimed feeling based on sex-based stereotypes that harm women and girls. The conflict is unavoidable: Either sex is immutable and biologically based, or it is changeable and based entirely on a subjective feeling. If a man can be a woman, the sex category “woman” cannot be protected in law from historic and ongoing discrimination.
Article 4 reaffirms women’s rights to freedom of opinion and freedom of expression, including the right to hold and express opinions about “gender identity.” This is consistent with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Article 7 of the Declaration reaffirms the rights of women and girls to the same opportunities as men and boys to participate actively in sports and physical education, consistent with Article 10 (g) of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and with the original intentions of Title IX Education Amendments of 1972.
As Eric Vilain, a professor of human genetics at UCLA and consultant to the IOC medical commission has noted, “We separate men and women into categories because we want women to be able to win some competitions. There is a 10% to 12% difference between male and female athletic performance.” Significant differences in the average bone density, heart size, lung volume, hemoglobin levels, and musculoskeletal development of men and women, among other physical differences, result in men being able to generate higher speed and power during physical activity. Even after two years of testosterone suppression, males retain physical advantage over females, especially when it comes to speed and upper body strength.
Article 8 of the Declaration, reaffirming the need for the elimination of violence against women, asserts that “violence against women is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women as a sex are forced into a subordinate position compared with men as a sex,” and that single-sex provisions should include those that “promote the physical safety, privacy and dignity of women and girls.”
Allowing males, including school boys, into designated female-only spaces such as public restrooms, changing rooms, showers, spas, and so forth, has disastrous consequences for the safety, privacy, and dignity of women and girls, including voyeurism, exhibitionism, filming women while using facilities, sexual assault, and rape.
As to the rights of “transgender people,” nobody is “transgender.” The men and boys who call themselves “transgender” claim to be what they are not, and thereby demand access to women’s public bathrooms and women’s and girls’ sports; they are, however, men and boys, based on objectively verifiable and immutable reproductive biology. Men and boys have the protection of all of the laws and policies of the federal, state, and local governments – as men. Humans cannot change sex. Women and girls, along with all other citizens, should have the right to reject the lie that some men are women, without being censored. “Hate speech” policies that prevent people from referring to a man as a man are dangerously anti-democratic. Free speech must not be curtailed because a man’s feelings might be hurt by being called a man. If we cannot tolerate hurt feelings, we cannot tolerate democracy.
Women must be allowed to speak the truth.
Women deserve to have their single sex spaces recognized, not all countries in the world recognize the notion that gender identity nullifies biological sex, so it’s imperative that Meta not make this harmful choice that will have global repercussions.
Open debate about contentious topics is important and should not be classed as "hate speech" where the term is misused. When various jurisidictions are debating issues like gender self-identification, pedatric medicine, women's and gay people's freedom to associate (as with the Lesbian Action Group case in Australia), there needs to be a way to speak. Where the media is most polarised, for example in the USA, the only result is two very intensely polarised camps. Those of us who want to be able to discuss legal and policy issues in a civil way, without labelling either trans people as deviants or women with boundaries as bigots, need to be able to do so.
Hello,
I am writing regarding the censoring of not only free speech but fact based language. To restrict the rights of users to refer to male people as male and female people as female is demoralizing and dangerous. What are we going to be left with if we are only permitted to say lies - if it is a crime to call a male person male?
I support the rights and safety of all people. Included in all people are women. Women deserve sex-segregated spaces for their safety and in the case of sport for fairness. Women deserve the right to talk about the issues that affect them including how gender identity takes away women’s rights to safety and fairness that (formerly) sex-segregated spaces afford(ed).
Most people get their news from social media. Will it be accurate? Will it reflect biological and physical reality? Or will it only reflect the thoughts and feelings of some who are wrongly deemed to be more oppressed than females?
Sincerely,
Freda Bear
When we legalized gay marriage, we gave rights to gays and lesbians that they were absolutely entitled to, because they are rights that everyone one is entitled to; equal rights, the right to marry to marry the person you love.
With so-called Trans-Rights, you are giving rights to MEN in particular that they have absolutely no right to, because you are giving them these rights by taking them away from WOMEN. Women's rights to safe places; bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, prisons. Women's right to complete in sports against WOMEN. Women's right to their very identity as women.
NO MAN HAS THE RIGHT TO BE A WOMAN! Giving men this right is an assault on women's rights. Gender is not a choice. Gender is not an identity. Gender is a biological FACT. And if you believe otherwise, it is just that, a BELIEF, and you have no right to force your beliefs on others in a Free and Democratic society.
Both videos are real case scenes...they need to be out in the open. Facts not fantasies matter. Men are not women. U.N. Special Rappoteur Reem Alsaleem July 2023 wrote to explain women's human rights, sex based rights to our own spaces...to Scottish parliamrnt. Please read and take on board our human rights to safe places, women only spaces, sports. Men need to respect women. Femicides happen every few minutes. Allowing men into women's spaces is dangerous to ourselves our mental health our lives.
As long as comments are respectful , there should be no censoring. Telling the truth about sex as binary is not hate speech, since it upholds biological reality as well as evolution.
Women should also be able to express their feelings on women’s only private spaces just as men have men’s spaces . Women’s rights should not be trumped by gender rights. Women, being the weaker sex, should not allow men in sports competitions. Trans women , since they are biological men should compete in their own leagues or in men’s leagues.
Bullying is very different than objecting to the invasion of woman's space. Women and others are being bullied into silence and even worse, into giving up safe spaces: prisons, toilets, sports, etc.
Furthermore, social media is an important for discussion and connection. Please do not silence women. Many questions need discussion.
(1) The medico-industrial complex has rapidly embraced bodily interventions. For example, the pharmaceutical giant Gilead created TRANScend Community Impact Fund, which donates 4.5 million to trans-organization. .The U.S. sex reassignment surgery market size was estimated at USD 2.1 billion in 2022 and is anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.25% from 2023 to 2030.Do profit motives propel and normalize some of these interventions? Who is benefiting?
(2) In light of the scandal of Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal claiming they are transracial, what are the differing logics between claiming a race and claiming a sex?
(4) How does gender infiltrate biological sex? For example, with the influx of transwomen from men’s prisons to women’s prisons, are there or should there be definitional expectations on sexual identification?
Conversations about, and especially, critical of trans issues should not be treated as suspect and in need of regulation any more than other conversations on personal or public policy. Trans advocates have too often used the false claim of harm to silence those who have a different policy position than their own. The potential harm to children resulting from unnecessary and irreversible surgical procedures and medical treatments require open and frank debate that may make some people uncomfortable. Accusing those making difficult points of engaging in hate speech is nothing less than intolerance of diverse points of view.
Indeed, those claiming to be the object of hate speech should be the ones subjected to heightened scrutiny for attempting to stifle debate instead of accepting their accusations at face value and treating the accused as guilty until proven innocent.
Recent admissions by Marc Zuckerberg that his companies improperly censored conversations for the benefit of one political party places a heavy burden on those who would want to limit similar conversations in the future. There cannot be the slightest hint that the personal policy and ideological preferences of those wielding the power of censorship had anything to do with the decisions they make in using that power.
Meta appears to be accepting as fact the premise that people can change sex.
But people can't do that. Gender is just another word for sex. And we are each the same sex throughout life. Sex is a biological reality. It's encoded in our DNA.
While there are some people who claim to have changed sex (or gender), there is no evidence of any kind to support such claims.
Some people believe the claims without requiring evidence. They have faith in the claims, just as some have faith in the claims of Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or other religious thought.
In essence, because the idea that one can change sex or gender is based solely on belief, not evidence, demanding that others use names, pronouns, or other identifiers that correspond to a sex that is different from biological sex at birth is akin to demanding that others share this belief system.
That appears to be the confusion regarding the posts involved in the case. Users who adhere to the transgender belief system demand that Meta essentially treat those who don't share their belief system as blasphemers. They claim that it's hateful to correctly identify the sex of people in posts.
It is not hateful. It is not blasphemy. It is simply an indication of belief in biology, which DOES have evidence to support it.
If Meta would not censor comments that are at odds with the beliefs of any OTHER belief system, it should not censor statements that run counter to the transgender belief system. Failing to observe someone else's beliefs in the way that person prefers they be observed is not hate. Belief should not be policed by social media.
Transgender "women" are men. As men, they should not be allowed in women's spaces, such as restrooms, changing rooms, locker rooms, prisons, etc. Nor should they be allowed to compete in women's sports.
Gender ideology--the supplantation of sex (real) with gender (fabricated/socialized)--is a metaphysical faith belief that harms groups that are oppressed or exploited on the basis of sex by erasing sex entirely in law and culture.
The Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights (the Declaration) was created to lobby nations to protect women and girls on the basis of sex rather than “gender” or “gender identity,” based on well-established principles of international law.
Article 1 of the Declaration reaffirms that the rights of women and girls are based on the category of sex. The inclusion of “gender identity” in a legal definition of sex necessarily replaces sex with “gender identity,” a claimed feeling based on sex-based stereotypes that harm women and girls. The conflict is unavoidable: Either sex is immutable and biologically based, or it is changeable and based entirely on a subjective feeling. If a man can be a woman, the sex category “woman” cannot be protected in law from historic and ongoing discrimination.
Article 4 reaffirms women’s rights to freedom of opinion and freedom of expression, including the right to hold and express opinions about “gender identity.” This is consistent with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Article 7 of the Declaration reaffirms the rights of women and girls to the same opportunities as men and boys to participate actively in sports and physical education, consistent with Article 10 (g) of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and with the original intentions of Title IX Education Amendments of 1972.
As Eric Vilain, a professor of human genetics at UCLA and consultant to the IOC medical commission has noted, “We separate men and women into categories because we want women to be able to win some competitions. There is a 10% to 12% difference between male and female athletic performance.” Significant differences in the average bone density, heart size, lung volume, hemoglobin levels, and musculoskeletal development of men and women, among other physical differences, result in men being able to generate higher speed and power during physical activity. Even after two years of testosterone suppression, males retain physical advantage over females, especially when it comes to speed and upper body strength.
Article 8 of the Declaration, reaffirming the need for the elimination of violence against women, asserts that “violence against women is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women as a sex are forced into a subordinate position compared with men as a sex,” and that single-sex provisions should include those that “promote the physical safety, privacy and dignity of women and girls.”
Allowing males, including school boys, into designated female-only spaces such as public restrooms, changing rooms, showers, spas, and so forth, has disastrous consequences for the safety, privacy, and dignity of women and girls, including voyeurism, exhibitionism, filming women while using facilities, sexual assault, and rape.
As to the rights of “transgender people,” nobody is “transgender.” The men and boys who call themselves “transgender” claim to be what they are not, and thereby demand access to women’s public bathrooms and women’s and girls’ sports; they are, however, men and boys, based on objectively verifiable and immutable reproductive biology. Men and boys have the protection of all of the laws and policies of the federal, state, and local governments – as men. Humans cannot change sex. Women and girls, along with all other citizens, should have the right to reject the lie that some men are women, without being censored. “Hate speech” policies that prevent people from referring to a man as a man are dangerously anti-democratic. Free speech must not be curtailed because a man’s feelings might be hurt by being called a man. If we cannot tolerate hurt feelings, we cannot tolerate democracy.
Women’s Declaration International (WDI) is a global, nonpartisan group of volunteer women dedicated to protecting women’s sex-based rights. WDI USA is its U.S. chapter.
The Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights (the Declaration) was created to lobby nations to protect women and girls on the basis of sex rather than “gender” or “gender identity,” based on well-established principles of international law.
Article 1 of the Declaration reaffirms that the rights of women and girls are based on the category of sex. The inclusion of “gender identity” in a legal definition of sex necessarily replaces sex with “gender identity,” a claimed feeling based on sex-based stereotypes that harm women and girls. The conflict is unavoidable: Either sex is immutable and biologically based, or it is changeable and based entirely on a subjective feeling. If a man can be a woman, the sex category “woman” cannot be protected in law from historic and ongoing discrimination.
Article 4 reaffirms women’s rights to freedom of opinion and freedom of expression, including the right to hold and express opinions about “gender identity.” This is consistent with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Article 7 of the Declaration reaffirms the rights of women and girls to the same opportunities as men and boys to participate actively in sports and physical education, consistent with Article 10 (g) of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and with the original intentions of Title IX Education Amendments of 1972.
As Eric Vilain, a professor of human genetics at UCLA and consultant to the IOC medical commission has noted, “We separate men and women into categories because we want women to be able to win some competitions. There is a 10% to 12% difference between male and female athletic performance.” Significant differences in the average bone density, heart size, lung volume, hemoglobin levels, and musculoskeletal development of men and women, among other physical differences, result in men being able to generate higher speed and power during physical activity. Even after two years of testosterone suppression, males retain physical advantage over females, especially when it comes to speed and upper body strength.
Article 8 of the Declaration, reaffirming the need for the elimination of violence against women, asserts that “violence against women is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women as a sex are forced into a subordinate position compared with men as a sex,” and that single-sex provisions should include those that “promote the physical safety, privacy and dignity of women and girls.”
Allowing males, including school boys, into designated female-only spaces such as public restrooms, changing rooms, showers, spas, and so forth, has disastrous consequences for the safety, privacy, and dignity of women and girls, including voyeurism, exhibitionism, filming women while using facilities, sexual assault, and rape.
As to the rights of “transgender people,” nobody is “transgender.” The men and boys who call themselves “transgender” claim to be what they are not, and thereby demand access to women’s public bathrooms and women’s and girls’ sports; they are, however, men and boys, based on objectively verifiable and immutable reproductive biology. Men and boys have the protection of all of the laws and policies of the federal, state, and local governments – as men. Humans cannot change sex. Women and girls, along with all other citizens, should have the right to reject the lie that some men are women, without being censored. “Hate speech” policies that prevent people from referring to a man as a man are dangerously anti-democratic. Free speech must not be curtailed because a man’s feelings might be hurt by being called a man. If we cannot tolerate hurt feelings, we cannot tolerate democracy.
Mammals are either male or female. Sex in mammals can't change. Not to be able or not to be allowed to refer to human males as men or boys or human females as women or girls is tampering with reality. It also messes with everyone's perception as we are all geared to recognize males and females of our species almost instantly in most cases.