ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Media, Creative, and Cultural Industries
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1640230
Feminist Exploratory Interpretive Study of the Content Policy Changes of Meta and its News Coverage
Provisionally accepted
- University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland
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The Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently made an announcement that there will be major changes to his company's content moderation policies. As part of this move, Meta is eliminating its third-party fact-checking program, and replacing it with a community based program called Community Notes as well as making changes to the "Hateful Conduct" policy document of Meta. Under conditions of rising anti-gender backlash and the emergence of post-truth societies transnationally with distorted notions of truth, these changes are deeply concerning for social media researchers, media studies researchers, gender studies researchers and policy scholars as well, as not only CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg but also, politicians like vice-president JD Vance, can be seen as launching a brutal ideological assault on Europe. Taking into account these political dynamics, in this article, by adopting an exploratory approach, I investigated (i) how are the proposed policy changes of Meta discursively constructed in major European online news outlets; (ii) what are the actual policy changes, taking into account women and LGBTIQ+ identities? (iii) what should/ could be the European level response to this situation considering policy and civil society level discussions? Having an exploratory approach, I carried out a thematic-discursive analysis of articles from major European news sources published online between 7 January and 7 March 2025 related to the announcements of Mark Zuckerberg as well as responses to these announcements and Meta's official "Hateful Conduct" policy document and GLAAD's official statement. Adopting an intersectional feminist standpoint theory, strong objectivity and group oppression theory, the emerging themes of this research are (i) retreat on human rights, LGBTIQ+ rights and freedom of expression, (ii) frightening developments for the rise of misinformation/ disinformation, (iii) Zuckerberg as "re-setting relations with Europe, ignoring Digital Services Act of EU and the need to debunk ´institutionalization of censorship claims".
Keywords: exploratory approach1, feminist standpoint theory2, hate speech policies3, news media4, Meta5, social media6, content moderation7, LGBTIQ+
Received: 03 Jun 2025; Accepted: 30 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Asardag. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Dilara Asardag, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland
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