Threats against politicians rose dramatically after Meta changed its rules on speech

Last year, dead Radically I fixed the rules About the content they will allow on their platforms. Company He claimed That its own efforts to police speech had gone too far and that it would relax rules on permissible expression. “We have over-enforced our rules, limiting legitimate political debate, censoring too much trivial content, and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, wrote in an article. Blog post at that time.

After more than a year, New search The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) shows the direct impact of these changes.

Researchers analyzed about 8 million comments on Facebook and found that offensive and racist comments targeting Republican and Democratic lawmakers tripled in the six months after the new rules were put in place. Some categories of offensive comments documented by the researchers saw sharper rises, with violent threats and hate speech quadrupling during the same period.

The report cites specific examples of sexual and racist abuse directed at lawmakers such as US Representatives Yasmine Crockett of Texas and Byron Daniels of Florida. These comments have not been removed by Meta.

CCDH researchers also found that threats against President Trump more than doubled in the six months after Meta overhauled its rules. Researchers say many of the comments, which included direct threats to his life, could have been classified as criminal offences.

To evaluate the impact of these rule changes, CCDH researchers selected 100 House members, made up of the 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats with the largest followings on Facebook. The researchers then collected nearly 8 million comments on Facebook posts made by these lawmakers in the six months before and after the Meta policy changes.

The researchers used an AI system that was trained to identify comments in the dataset that were likely to violate existing Meta policies in three areas: violence and incitement, hateful behavior, or bullying and harassment.

Comments violating Meta’s policies on 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 to track offensive content on our platforms, and the prevalence of hateful behavior did not increase throughout 2025,” a Meta spokesperson told WIRED, adding that the company cannot address the report’s claims directly without seeing the full research. WIRED provided a list of the offensive comments mentioned in the report, but Meta did not comment on them. Hours before the report was published, several examples had been deleted from Facebook.

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

The data collected by CCDH researchers resonates with Meta’s Special transparency reports From 2025, which shows how the company reduced its proactive enforcement of content moderation by nearly half in the months following its policy changes. “The increase in violations and the breakdown in enforcement track each other almost perfectly,” the report authors wrote.

While Meta claimed that its decision to relax rules around offensive content was driven by principles of freedom of expression, experts say that extremist content like the comments covered in this report is the type of content that has been shown to have the most engagement on social media platforms.