Why Meta Is Introducing Anti-LGBTQ Guidelines Ahead of Trump 2.0: An Interview with Judd Legum

Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that Meta will eliminate fact-checkers and allow some hate speech against LGBTQ people and immigrants. Popular Information's Judd Legum explains.

Video by: E E Oliver

Headlines have been swirling all week in regard to Meta’s new rules. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the tech giant is eliminating its fact-checkers less than two weeks ahead of Trump’s inauguration. In addition, they’ve introduced guidelines that allow users to accuse LGBTQ people of being mentally ill because they are gay or transgender. So why exactly is the company—which boasts more than 3.3 billion daily users—doing this now?

To find out, I called up

Judd Legum

, Founder of Popular Information, a newsletter that focuses on accountability journalism. In 2020, it won the Online News Association’s Excellence in Journalism award in part for its reporting on Facebook and online misinformation.

Watch the full interview above or read the transcript here:

Spencer Macnaughton: Hello, everyone. I'm here with Judd Legum, an American journalist and lawyer. He's also the founder and author of the very successful Substack, Popular Information, which is an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism.

Judd, thank you so much for coming on with Uncloseted Media.

Judd Legum: Thanks for having me.

SM: We reached out to you because we wanted to have somebody give us more context on what Mark Zuckerberg announced this week in terms of changes over at Meta. For someone who hasn't read the news at all this week, can you give us the broad strokes on what he announced, what he's doing and what will be changing at the company as it relates to fact-checkers and beyond?

JL: Overall, I think it represents a cultural shift in the whole company to align himself more closely with the right, quite frankly. And it appears that each of the individual components of the announcement had that purpose.

One of the announcements, probably the one that got the biggest headlines thus far, was to eliminate the fact-checking program. This is something I have done a lot of reporting on, dating back to 2018, 2019, when the program was first launching and it is a deeply flawed program. They didn't put much investment into it, so they put very little money into it and so very few people saw any fact-checks of any content. There's so much content put on Facebook, on Instagram, all of those things.

Secondly, they signed up a lot of publications to do fact-checks, who themselves have a very checkered record as far as producing factual information, like The Daily Caller, which was founded by Tucker Carlson, was one of their fact-checkers.

And in fact, Joel Kaplan, who has been with Meta for many years and is a Republican operative and became famous because he's one of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's close associates and friends. He was there to support [Kavanaugh] during the confirmation hearings and was just promoted to be [Meta’s] chief policy officer. He was the one who pushed to have The Daily Caller as part of their fact-checking program. He also was the one who just appeared on Fox and Friends to announce this slate of changes.

So all this goes by way of saying this wasn't a great program. It wasn't doing a ton of good. Fact-checking itself is important in my view but this fact-checking program was more about insulating the company from blame for the widespread misinformation that spread on the platform and they started getting criticism for that, of course, after the 2016 election.

But the way in which Zuckerberg announced this was to say, well, the problem is that these fact-checkers, who are, by the way, hand-selected by Meta, were just too political, eroded trust, were using it kind of as a political cudgel and basically adopting the language of Trump, whose campaign really went on and declared war against fact-checkers during his 2024 campaign.

So I think that in that case, the move probably isn't as important as the way that he framed it and sort of adopting this kind of anti-journalism posture and really incorporating this critique of the media [and how they are] really biased against Republicans and the right.

SM: I found it interesting that Zuckerberg, in the video he released, talked about how we want to move back towards free speech and then I also found it interesting that they decided to have Joel Kaplan go on “Fox and Friends,” of all places, to kind of make this announcement. What do you think's behind those decisions? Because, of course, all of that is strategic and preplanned.

JL: Well, I think they're looking at the relationship that Elon Musk has with Donald Trump, and they are wanting to develop a similar relationship and that is really a thread that pulls through all of these announcements. So they've eliminated the fact-checking program, but they're replacing it with this Community Notes-style system, which they explicitly said was modeled after what Elon Musk has put into place on X, and it's really about aligning themselves more in the Musk mold to try to get and cement that relationship.

The other part of this announcement that really stuck out and underscores that, was Zuckerberg saying that they're going to continue some content moderation about certain topics, but they're moving their content moderation team to Texas because Zuckerberg says that Texas is a place where people have less concern about bias, which is also something that Musk talks about a lot, that Texas is the greatest place. He's moved the headquarters of Tesla to Texas. He moved the headquarters of X to Texas. And that somehow is this neutral place and California is just full of biased people. And so all of that is pretty ridiculous on its face. The only way that it's preferable is if you are trying to pander to the right.

SM: It seems like they are just trying to pander to the incoming Trump administration. Is that the key reason or is there more to the story?

JL: There's more to it, in that I think that Zuckerberg has always blown with the wind somewhat and even references this. He says that this is now a new cultural moment, so it's not so much, “I believe in free speech. This is what I am doing.” Because if you did believe in free speech, this wouldn't be the slate of changes that you would implement. It's more like, “Here's my sense of where I think we are culturally.” I'm not sure his analysis is correct, but that's his analysis, and [Zuckerberg] is going to then align [him]self with that.

SM: One of the things that was frankly really alarming to me as somebody who runs an LGBTQ-focused news publication is in their revised guidelines they say a lot of hate speech isn't going to be allowed but they [caveated that with], “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation. Given political or religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common nonserious usage of words like weird.” I'm curious what you thought when you saw that.

JL: Yeah, I think it kind of gives away the game a bit when you kind of dig into this document. Zuckerberg has framed this up as supporting free speech and a simplification. [But] if you compare the documents, the new document isn't any simpler. It's not any shorter. It's not any clearer than the old document.

In fact, in many cases they've added complexity, just like the portion you just read, where they're now saying, in general, you can't dehumanize people, we're going to keep that in. But here are some exceptions where we think it's okay for you to dehumanize people. That's not a defense of free speech. That's just saying, “Well, Trump and the MAGA base like to disparage trans people or LGBTQ people in these specific ways and so we're now saying that we are going to allow those”, while kind of halfheartedly maintaining [their] general prohibitions against dehumanizing language in other ways.

It's no simpler, it's not free speech, but it is going to essentially allow—and kind of green light—this kind of hateful discourse. And I think framing this as, “This is mainstream political discourse,” is really kind of gross.

It's one thing to say, “Hey, look, we're a free speech platform. There's going to be things that I disagree with.” It's another thing to say, “Well, claiming that this whole group of people who do not have a mental illness actually have a mental illness and disparage it in that way, that's just mainstream. And we're going to allow that because it's just common sense that we should allow that.” That's a far different thing to say.

SM: It's essentially like saying if the mainstream, if the majority of Americans want to just start bullying Black people, we should allow discrimination against Black people on our platform. It's analogous, is it not?

JL: Yeah, I think it kind of goes back to what I was saying before, it's not about principle, it's about putting your finger to the wind and seeing what you think is okay at this moment. And that could change at any time and it should be disturbing not just to the people that are targeted. The two main groups, I think, that are targeted are the LGBTQ community and then also immigrants, because there were carveouts for them as well. But it really should be, even if you're not one of those two groups, disturbing to everyone because it shows that all of this is conditional.

For instance, Zuckerberg a couple of years ago got into some trouble by saying that Holocaust denial was not something that he would restrict on Facebook or any of his other platforms because he didn't think that restricting that kind of debate would really be useful, it's better to let people call it out. So [restricting Holocaust denial is] still in there for now.

But what if Zuckerberg decides, well, that's okay again now because Musk actually is trying to mainstream a political party in Germany that many people consider to be a neo-Nazi party. So that's becoming more mainstream. There are no principles involved. It's all just sort of up to wherever Mark Zuckerberg happens to think that the culture is at the moment.

SM: I think a lot of Americans will see this news and might think, who cares? Let [Zuckerberg] do what he wants, it's a free country. But what do you think when these announcements are made are the bottom line implications for the LGBTQ community? Why does this matter?

JL: I think it matters because these platforms are so enormous and they really exist to replace the open web. You have to realize that, X is like this and Meta is like this now, if you try to post a link to some other site, to a Substack for instance, where we both have publications, it downranks you. It's not going to let that move around its network.

So the kind of discourse that occurs on these large social platforms has a huge impact on the overall political discourse. So the decisions they make are important.

I think you could make an argument and say it's just too complicated. We can't figure it out. When we tried to restrict this kind of hateful speech, we end up restricting people who are criticizing that speech and we can't figure it out. And so we're just going to take a more of a hands-off approach or we're going to have a community-driven approach. But that's different than carving out these little exceptions and saying these really horrendous, dehumanizing insults against a group of people, often vulnerable people, is okay and this one's still not okay.

I mean, the fact that a couple of billionaires have the power to make fine determinations, I think everyone should be disturbed about.

SM: Is there anything that can be done legally, policy-wise that would change the amount of power that the Zuckerberg's, the Musk’s, these monstrous tech companies have?

JD: I think there are a lot of things that can be done and probably a lot of the reason why you see these tech CEOs and moguls lining themselves up with Trump is to prevent that.

One of the reasons why [they]'re able to do this and not suffer repercussions is because there's very little competition among these social media platforms. One of the reasons why there's very little competition is because Meta bought Instagram. So now there's not Instagram competing with Facebook, it's all under one umbrella, and also WhatsApp, which is an extremely important, messaging system and social network all across the world, where they have control over what kind of discourse is allowed on there.

Would we be in a better position if independently, Instagram and Facebook were able to make their own kinds of rules and see which ones users liked more? I think even the absence of that, because we have four years of the Trump administration coming, I don't think you're going to see a lot of antitrust enforcement against any of these companies, certainly less than we've seen, you know, there are alternatives. I think Bluesky is growing fairly rapidly. Using and growing these alternative platforms helps start a counterbalance.

SM: One of the stats that keeps me up at night is 41% of LGBTQ kids in America seriously considered suicide in the last year. So when you now have an America who doesn't have the fact-checkers on Meta and where you greenlight this type of behavior, what are your concerns for Americans’ perceptions of LGBTQ people, with these new rules, on a platform where 3.3 billion people are using it every day?

JD: I'm concerned and I think I'm concerned particularly for the LGBTQ community. This is downstream from the election and I think we have to understand these moves and the very specific moves in Meta’s community standards in the context of the election, but there was a perception at the very least that a lot of these anti-trans ads that were run extensively targeting Harris were effective.

Now, my business isn't to analyze the effectiveness of ads. I don't know if they were effective or not. They might have been. They may not have been, but I don't think that we should make determinations about what kind of discourse is socially acceptable and that we think reflects our values, based on the political result of one election. But that's what's happened, and if that's the way in which we're going to make our decisions, that's a really disturbing path.

SM: In your article “Meta goes MAGA”, you said it is now permissible based on the new rules to describe people as feces or filth, based on their immigration status or gender identity. A lot of news outlets would not go so far and use that extreme language. Why do you in your writing decide to do that?

JL: I think it's important for people to understand exactly what is going on. The media in general has sanitized a lot of what is going on culturally and politically in order to meet their own standards, they don't want to print this stuff in their newspaper because it kind of makes them feel gross.

But people need to know. So that's why I do it. I don't star out the curse words or do anything like that because I want people to really see it and feel what's happening and it's not always pleasant.

SM: What do you think these decisions say about who Zuckerberg is as a leader and as a person?

JL: I thought it was interesting, I saw a story in Bloomberg, he's making this speech, supposedly about his commitment to free speech, and he's wearing a $900,000 custom-made watch as he delivers the speech. So to me it shows that the priority is profits.

In 2021, right after January 6th, when he kicked Trump off of the platform, it seemed like profits required him to distance himself from the MAGA movement, to distance himself from Trump. So that's what he did. But then when Trump won re-election anyway all of that was put into the memory hole, and we were now aligning ourselves with Trump. So what does it say about him as a person? I think it shows where his priorities are. He doesn't appear to really oppose Trump or support Trump. He's willing to do both when it suits his economic interests.

This is someone who created an entire organization called FWD.us, that was devoted to protecting undocumented immigrants in the United States. Now, [he’s] making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, wrapping himself up in MAGA rhetoric, appointing one of Trump's best friends, Dana White, onto the Meta board, one of the most anti-immigrant candidates in modern history. So it's an amazing sort of shapeshifting that we've seen in just a few years and I think it's very revealing about where his priorities are.

SM: I was just at my boyfriend's family's home in Virginia and I asked one of them, “What's your favorite source of news?” And he said, “Jordan Peterson: accurate, accurate, accurate, factual.” So I think a big problem in this country is media literacy, where folks really don't know the difference between a Jordan Peterson and an Associated Press.

Do you have any tips or tricks for average Americans who might not have gone to journalism school? How can they really understand, in a world where fact-checkers are gone from Meta, the difference between something that's perhaps bulletproof journalism versus just thirsty influencers trying to get content clicks?

JL: Yeah, it's very tough. It's very, very difficult. So I don't have any silver bullet, but I do think, especially in an era where you do have folks like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, who are really more entertainers, kind of posing as sources of news, and then add on a layer of AI and automated news that's presenting what could be hallucinations and kind of slop, as fact, it's more important than ever to work to identify a handful of sources that you can trust and to rely on those sources.

Then when you add anything outside of that realm, you really need to determine whether it can be verified. If someone makes a claim, what's the basis for that claim? Where can I go? Where can they link me to? Can I read that study? Can I see that report? Can I see that data? All of these statistics, especially if it's coming from someone who you haven't determined over a period of time is reliable, you need to view skeptically and you need to essentially take with a grain of salt until you can verify it. And unfortunately, that's the reality that we are living in. Is that reasonable to expect someone who maybe has a couple of kids or a couple of jobs or other types of obligations? Not really. But that's what it takes right now in order to be informed.

SM: Anything else to say on these tech CEOs pandering to Trump at a time when he's suing CBS News, when he's suing ABC News, when he's suing The Des Moines Register, continuing to call the press the enemy of the people? It's an alarming time to be a journalist in certain ways, isn't it?

JL: It is. It is an alarming time to be a journalist. I hope everything works out okay for me, it's more incentive for me to double-check all my facts and make sure that I have everything triple-sourced and so I'll be taking extra care to do that.

But I will say that, and this is something that Zuckerberg did in this announcement, it's something that Elon Musk does constantly, it’s something that Trump does, it's really part of wrapping this up in free expression. But as you point out, this is a group of people who care very little about free expression. I mean, between Trump and Musk, they sue more journalists than anyone.

Also the places like Texas and Florida that they hold out as bastions of free speech, have the most draconian restrictions on speech, unconstitutional restrictions in many cases, taking books out of libraries because they happen to have LGBTQ characters, banning certain conversations about race and gender in the workplace. There is just a sustained attack on free speech.

As a progressive, I think it is important for myself and other progressives to reclaim this idea of free speech. The powerful will always have free speech. Billionaires will always have free speech. It doesn't matter. They have plenty of ways to get their message out. The people who need these protections are the people who are the most vulnerable.

SM: Judd, thank you so much. This has been fantastic. Where can viewers and readers find your work? Plug yourself.

JL: The place to go is popular.info. That's where you can sign up. Get the newsletter, it comes out four times a week, so plenty of information there. You can also follow me on Bluesky if you'd like, I'm there: JuddLegum.

SM: Fantastic. Thank you so much. This has been great.

JL: Thanks a lot for having me.

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