OAN Staff James Meyers
12:28 PM – Friday, April 25, 2025
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has declared that two highly circulated online posts on its platforms that received complaints, due to the posters’ decision to purposely “misgender” the individuals captured on video, were not a violation of its policies.
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This week, Meta’s Oversight Board upheld decisions by Facebook and Instagram to leave up two posts discussing biological males who identify as transgender women — even after pro-LGBTQ users reported the language as being “harmful.”
“Despite the intentionally provocative nature of the posts, which ‘misgender’ identifiable trans people in ways many would find offensive, a majority of the Board found they related to matters of public concern and would not incite likely and imminent violence or discrimination,” the Oversight Board said in a statement on the decision.
Back in September, Meta’s Oversight Board announced that it was looking into two posts from last year which involved videos of males identifying as women.
One of the posts was from the popular “Libs of TikTok” account on Instagram, which showed an Oregon high school male athlete getting “booed” by a crowd after finishing in first place while competing in the girls’ 200-meter race.
“He’s a boy who thinks he’s a girl,” Libs of TikTok captioned the post.
The other post in question involved a video posted to Facebook showing a woman bravely confronting a trans-identifying biological male in the women’s restroom. Payton McNabb, a female high school athlete who suffered injuries in 2022 after a “transgender female” volleyball player on the other team spiked a volleyball at her face, demonstrating his masculine strength, was rumored to have filmed the video.
However, soon after, the two posts were reported for “Hate Speech and Bullying and Harassment” multiple times, but Meta purposely left both posts up — deciding that neither one had violated Meta’s Community Standards.
Users who reported the media appealed the decision to the Oversight Board. Nonetheless, the board ruled on Wednesday in favor of Meta’s original decision to leave the two posts up. Rulings by the Oversight Board on specific posts are considered binding for the company.
“The Hate Speech policy does not include misgendering as a form of prohibited ‘attack,’” the Oversight Board noted, as it announced that they were looking into the videos.
“In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far,” Meta said.
“We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression,” the company said.
The company also stated that it will be “getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.”
Meta was previously under fire during the Biden administration for censoring truthful stories and facts, such as the Hunter Biden laptop discovery and the possible negative side affects of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
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