Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav 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.
The researchers analyzed about 8 million Facebook comments and found that abusive and racist comments targeting both Republican and Democrat lawmakers tripled in the six months after the new rules were put in place. Some categories of abusive comments documented by the researchers saw even sharper rises, with violent threats and hate speech quadrupling during the same period.
The CCDH researchers also found that threats against President Trump more than doubled in the six months after Meta overhauled its rules. Many of the comments, which included direct threats to his life, could have been classified as felony offenses, the researchers say.
To assess the impact of these rule changes, CCDH’s researchers chose 100 members of the House of Representatives made up of the 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats with the most followers on Facebook. Then the researchers scraped nearly 8 million comments on Facebook posts made by those lawmakers in the six months before and after Meta’s policy changes.
The researchers used an AI system trained to identify comments in the dataset that were likely to violate Meta’s current policies in three areas: violence and incitement, hateful conduct, or bullying and harassment.
Comments that violated Meta’s policies around violent threats quadrupled, from 1,800 in the six months before the changes to 7,600 in the six months after. Hate speech comments also quadrupled, from 6,900 to 30,000. Comments that broke Meta’s rules on bullying and harassment doubled, from 15,700 to 39,900.
“We regularly issue public reports tracking violating content on our platforms, and the prevalence of hateful conduct did not increase throughout 2025,” a Meta spokesperson tells WIRED, adding that the company could not address the report’s claims directly without seeing the research in its entirety. WIRED did provide a list of the abusive comments cited in the report, but Meta did not comment on these. Hours before the report was published, many of the examples were deleted from Facebook.
“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.
While Meta claimed its decision to relax rules around abusive content was driven by free speech principles, experts say that extremist content like the comments covered in this report are the type of content that has been shown to be the most engaging on social media platforms.
“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.”
The rising threats against lawmakers have real-world implications. The Capitol Police cited increased threats to politicians in March when seeking a budget increase. Former US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was the lawmaker in the report who faced the most abusive comments, referenced threats to her life as one of the reasons she stepped away from public life.
“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.”
This story originally appeared on wired.com.
