Meta Changed Its Speech Rules. Then Threats Against Politicians Skyrocketed

Last year, Meta radically overhauled the rules around what content it would allow on its platforms. The company claimed that its own efforts policing speech had gone too far and that it would relax the rules around what speech was allowed. “We have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, wrote in a blog post at the time.

Over a year later, new research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) shows the immediate impact of these changes.

“When companies reduce oversight in areas like violence, hate, and harassment, it should not be any surprise to see those harms increase,” Senator John Curtis, a Republican from Utah and a member of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, said in a statement to CCDH.

The data collected by CCDH researchers is echoed in Meta’s own transparency reports from 2025, which show how the company cut its proactive content moderation enforcement by roughly half in the months following its policy changes. “The surge in abuse and the collapse in enforcement track one another almost exactly,” the report’s authors write.

“Threats and abuse perform well, as do the responses to the threats and abuse,” says Nina Jankowicz, the CEO of the American Sunlight Project who briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board under President Joe Biden. “They keep users scrolling and keep eyeballs on ads. By divesting from content moderation, platforms are amplifying abusive content, saving on the ‘expense’ of keeping their platform safe, and falling into political lockstep with an administration that claims content moderation is censorship.”

“We've seen a horrifying trend of political violence, from the latest attack on the president to the murder of Charlie Kirk to the assassination of Melissa Hortman and her husband,” Imran Ahmed, the CEO of Center for Countering Digital Hate, tells WIRED. “Lawmakers are canceling town halls; they're moving them off online. Election officials are leaving the job. Representatives are saying in public the fear of being targeted shapes how they vote. I don't see how publishing, amplifying, and failing to enforce your own rules against this kind of harassment, threats, and identity-based hate can in any way be portrayed as a moral act. I think it takes incredible levels of duplicity to claim that."