Despite new changes to content moderation announced earlier this week, Meta—the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads—appears not to be changing its practices around marijuana, continuing to block search results on the social media platform for terms such as “marijuana” and “cannabis” and instead displaying a notice encouraging users to report “the sale of drugs.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a number of changes to content policies and moderation on Tuesday, such as stepping away from practices like third-party fact checking in favor of a community notes model, in which users are responsible for flagging questionable content. The company said it’s also “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.”
“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse,” the company said as part of the announcement, “and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.”
“Up until now, we have been using automated systems to scan for all policy violations, but this has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been,” the company added.
To many in the cannabis space—including some medical marijuana patients, cannabis content creators, news outlets and even government agencies—that feels like an apt description of how they’ve have been treated by the company, which has historically removed or limited the visibility of marijuana-related accounts.
But the new changes—touted under the banner of “free expression”—don’t appear to affect the handling of cannabis on Meta’s platforms.
Neither Facebook nor Meta replied to Marijuana Moment’s request for clarifications on the new policies this week, but the only mention of drugs in the new announcement is the company’s stated intent to “continue to focus” its content moderation systems “on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, drugs, fraud and scams.”
“For less severe policy violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action,” it says.
It’s unclear exactly when all the changes will be deployed. Facebook said it would implement the use of community notes “over the next couple of months, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year.” It didn’t provide a timeframe for changes to content moderation policies.
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