It’s not even double standards it’s just Meta Maga politics and there’s no point trying to explain the level of stupidity for their internal management justufications
My word of the day is Capricious…
MM write
Despite new changes to content moderation announced earlier this week, Meta—the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads—appears not to be changing its practices around marijuana, continuing to block search results on the social media platform for terms such as “marijuana” and “cannabis” and instead displaying a notice encouraging users to report “the sale of drugs.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a number of changes to content policies and moderation on Tuesday, such as stepping away from practices like third-party fact checking in favor of a community notes model, in which users are responsible for flagging questionable content. The company said it’s also “getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.”
“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse,” the company said as part of the announcement, “and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.”
“Up until now, we have been using automated systems to scan for all policy violations, but this has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been,” the company added.
To many in the cannabis space—including some medical marijuana patients, cannabis content creators, news outlets and even government agencies—that feels like an apt description of how they’ve have been treated by the company, which has historically removed or limited the visibility of marijuana-related accounts.
But the new changes—touted under the banner of “free expression”—don’t appear to affect the handling of cannabis on Meta’s platforms.
Neither Facebook nor Meta replied to Marijuana Moment’s request for clarifications on the new policies this week, but the only mention of drugs in the new announcement is the company’s stated intent to “continue to focus” its content moderation systems “on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, drugs, fraud and scams.”
“For less severe policy violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action,” it says.
It’s unclear exactly when all the changes will be deployed. Facebook said it would implement the use of community notes “over the next couple of months, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year.” It didn’t provide a timeframe for changes to content moderation policies.
As of this week, however, the platform still censors all searches involving the words “marijuana” or “cannabis”—even when searching for accounts that merely regulate state-legal marijuana, engage in political advocacy or simply report news related to the issue. A query for “Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission,” “Marijuana Policy Project,” or “Marijuana Moment,” for example, yields no results and instead displays a notice encouraging users: “If you see the sale of drugs, please report it.”
While many platforms have policies against the illegal sale of drugs or require age-gating for content around controlled substances, critics say Meta’s filtering often catches content focused on education, political advocacy and public health.
Reached this week, a spokesperson for the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission confirmed that the commission “has experienced challenges with some of its content appearing on social media channels, as have many licensed businesses.”
“Shadow bans and other restrictive measures make it challenging for stakeholders to search for our government agency,” the spokesperson said in a statement, “and can inhibit legitimate, timely messages from reaching members of the public.”
The statement called social media “a valuable tool for the Commission to communicate critical announcements to licensees and state residents, to increase education about responsible cannabis use and youth prevention through our ‘More About Marijuana’ campaign, and to promote new social equity programming opportunities.”
Another state regulatory agency, the New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission, said in an email that they had “no official statement on this matter” but added that in general, “We know that since cannabis remains a Federal Schedule I substance, social media companies often block posts that mention it.”
