Threats Against Politicians Rise After Meta Changes Its Speech Rules

Last year, Meta very much he revised the laws around what it will allow on its platforms. The company he said that his speech policing efforts had gone too far and that it would loosen the rules around what was allowed. “We have been aggressively enforcing our laws, limiting legitimate political debates and banning the most trivial and offensive actions,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s global chief executive, wrote in a statement. blog post at that time.

A year later, new research from the Center for Counting Digital Hate (CCDH) shows the latest developments.

The researchers analyzed nearly 8 million Facebook comments and found that abusive and racist comments targeting Republican and Democrat lawmakers tripled in the six months after the legislation was enacted. Other categories of offensive comments recorded by the researchers saw a sharp rise, with threats of violence and hate speech quadrupling over the same period.

The report provides specific examples of gender-based violence and racial discrimination against lawmakers such as US representatives Jasmine Crockette of Texas and Byron Daniels of Florida. These comments are not uploaded by Meta.

CCDH researchers also found that threats against President Trump doubled in the six months after Meta changed its rules. Many of the comments, which included threats to his life, could have been classified as crimes, investigators say.

To assess the impact of these constitutional changes, CCDH researchers selected 100 members of the House of Representatives made up of 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats with the most followers on Facebook. The researchers then sifted through nearly 8 million comments on Facebook pages created by lawmakers in the six months before and after the Meta policy change.

The researchers used an AI method trained to identify comments in the dataset that may violate Meta’s current policies in three areas: violence and incitement, hateful behavior, or oppression and harassment.

Comments that violated Meta policies related to violent threats quadrupled, from 1,800 in the six months before the change to 7,600 in the six months after. Hate comments have also quadrupled, from 6,900 to 30,000. Comments that violated Meta’s harassment and harassment policies doubled, from 15,700 to 39,900.

“We regularly report people targeting content violations on our site, and the number of hate speech has not increased in 2025,” a Meta spokesperson told WIRED, adding that the company could not directly address the report’s claims without seeing a full investigation. WIRED provided a list of the offensive words cited in the report, but Meta did not comment on it. Hours before the report was released, many of the samples were removed from Facebook.

“When companies reduce oversight in areas such as violence, hate, and harassment, it should not be surprising to see that harm increases,” Senator John Curtis, Republican from Utah and a member of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, said in a speech to the CCDH.

Data collected by CCDH researchers are described in Meta’s your visual reports from 2025, which shows how the company reduced its compliance by half in the months following its policy change. The authors of the report wrote: “The increase in violence and the collapse of law enforcement are closely related.

Although Meta said its decision to relax laws related to blasphemy was driven by libertarian principles, experts say that extreme content such as that described in the report is the type of content that has been shown to be more important on social media.