Researchers found that violent threats against politicians on Facebook surged in the six months after Meta relaxed its content moderation rules.
Meta rewrote its speech policies, pitching the changes publicly as a defense of free expression. In the six months that followed, threats against lawmakers on Facebook climbed, according to new research. The data includes threats targeting President Donald Trump, which complicates any partisan framing of who benefits from stricter or looser moderation. The research correlates the spike with the policy change rather than proving the rules caused it, but the timing is hard to dismiss.
This study hands regulators, advertisers, and litigants a concrete data point at a moment when platform moderation policy is being contested in legislatures, courts, and earnings calls. Meta has made a deliberate bet that looser speech rules would attract users and neutralize political criticism from the right. Research showing an associated uptick in threats against the very politicians Meta has been courting adds a complication the company will need to address publicly.
Meta's standing argument has been that its old rules were arbitrary and inconsistently enforced. The new rules may be consistent in a different direction.