It feels charmingly naive to look back to ten years ago – or maybe even just five – and remember that some social media platforms were once viewed as a wholesome escape. Now, “social media” is increasingly synonymous with “toxic” and PR messaging from platforms has been an exercise in damage control. Amid the protests following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, social media companies were quick to profess their interest in elevating vulnerable voices. Following the “Facebook papers” scandal in 2021, when allegations surfaced that Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) knew its platforms were causing harm to its users, the company insisted it had strict safeguards in place to protect people on their sites. Once viewed as one of those pleasantly serene platforms, Instagram is now having to scramble to assure the world it’s not contributing to teenage girls’ body dysmorphia. Even when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, and renamed it X, a host of new platforms explicitly and implicitly presented themselves as “more positive” alternatives (including Meta’s own rival app, Threads). This period was defined by platforms pitching to a perceived audience of people hungry for happy, ethical places to spend their free time.
That era, however, has come to an abrupt end. Last week, Meta announced changes to its long-standing moderation rules, removing fact-checking and narrowing its definition of harmful speech on its platforms. “Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said in a video about these new rules, aiming to “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, which are just out of touch with mainstream discourse”. Alongside the video, the company published revised censorship rules, which now permit users to post “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation” and “insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights, immigration or homosexuality”. Over the weekend, the company also announced the end of its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, saying “the legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing” and citing “charged” discussions around free speech in cases at the US Supreme Court in a memo to staff.
The timing of this change isn’t surprising: as a second Donald Trump presidency became increasingly likely over the summer and autumn, many high-profile billionaires sycophantically and transparently fell in line behind him. The influence of Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, reportedly resulted in the paper pulling its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris just weeks before the election. (Amazon also announced the termination of its own DEI programmes in December.) Elon Musk became Trump’s right-hand man after pumping a million dollars a day into his campaign. Amazon and Meta have both contributed $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund, a money pot used for the purposes of embellishing Trump’s swearing-in ceremony, which has also received contributions from tech companies such as Google (which owns YouTube), Boeing and OpenAI. When asked whether Meta’s changes were influenced by his threats to social media companies, Trump answered: “Probably.”
While no social media platform is seen as a utopian space in 2025, these developments have caused widespread shock and indignation. Within Meta itself, many staff are reportedly appalled. The Guardian described the changes as an “extinction-level event for the idea of objective truth on social media”. On platforms themselves, users were eager to voice their outrage at the new rules.
It’s an understandable reaction if you’ve spent the last decade taking platforms’ PR narratives at face value. But it is now unavoidably clear that social media companies’ promises to “#BeKind”, to foster global “connection”, and to cultivate harmonious digital spaces was merely performative. These were insincere attempts to appease the mainstream criticism amid the corporate social activism of the 2010s. But such “virtue signalling” – as Zuckerberg himself might now call it – has become rapidly unfashionable in our new age of regressive, popular misogyny and conservatism. Rather than a shift in values, this is instead a mask-off moment for these companies, who are showing us plainly who they’ve always been.
In 2025, we are not seeing a shift, but being forced to face a reality that has existed since social media began. When we look at our mainstream digital spaces – Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, and TikTok (which faces a possible ban in US from the Supreme Court) – we can’t pretend there is somewhere to post, watch, read and connect with others that doesn’t come with ethical baggage. The rules have changed, but the incentives are a constant: whatever makes the bottom line fatter and corporate pockets thicker. The only difference is that this no longer requires a pretence that social media is a force for social good.
This is not to say that things aren’t about to get worse – they will, and quickly. Meta’s previous barriers to abuse may have been flimsy, but they did restrain a small yet substantial amount of abuse. Without them, we will see something which strays closer to the spike in hate speech that occurred on X after Musk took over two years ago. There may once have been a brief moment we could have claimed ignorance about the questionable ethics of social media companies. But that period has long since ended. What we now contend with is the very powerful argument that it’s unscrupulous – maybe even immoral – to give these platforms our attention, ideas and hours of our lives, every single day.