Sadly, in my experience as an administrator of Facebook groups consisting of hundreds of thousands of queer people, Meta is merely formalizing a longstanding practice.

I'll never forget the death in Canada of a Lebanese pop star who happened to be a lesbian. This has been several years now, and after she died, at least a dozen memorial sites to her went up around Facebook, created by grieving fans.

Those sites were constantly defaced by users claiming that she deserved to die, that God wanted to her to die, that all gay people are despised by God. Many claims even encouraged gay people to kill ourselves, because God wants us to.

As all this started to happen, several users approached me and asked me to help them get Facebook to get serious about taking this stuff down.

So I helped organize a group of several hundred people, and we all reported the most egregious of the comments, especially the comments urging gay people to kill ourselves.

I was confident that Facebook just didn't know what was going on, and the situation would soon be taken care of. I was very, very wrong.

We soon began to get replies that the comments did not violate Facebook's community standards.

How?

Nobody was ever able to tell us how. The comments were obviously violations (on their face!) of published community standards.

I contacted a reporter from Reuters I knew because of work he had done about the LGBTQ refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya. I knew that he could reach out to Facebook officials, and I asked him to do that and to potentially write a story about the situation.

At first, he was very interested and even excited about doing a story. Then he reached out to Facebook, and after finishing discussions with them, he completely lost interest.

He told me I needed to understand that "content moderation is very hard," and that my expectations were probably too high.

I don't really know what he meant by that, but I gather Facebook told him that they had no interest in alienating a large base of users, and that he believed their concerns were legitimate or understandable.

That's the trouble!

Facebook is not now and never has been truly committed to keeping the platform safe and healthy for marginalized people. That would cut into their profits, and all sorts of people like that Reuters reporter apparently believe that's a consideration that everybody should hold "sacred."

When money is God, then safety and even basic morality can't mean much.