Last year, Meta overhauled the rules around what content is allowed on its platforms. The company claimed that its efforts to police speech had gone too far and that it would relax the rules around what speech was allowed. However, new research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) shows that this decision has led to a surge in abusive comments targeting politicians.
The researchers analyzed about 8 million Facebook comments and found that racist and abusive comments targeting both Republican and Democrat lawmakers tripled in the six months after the new rules were put in place. Some categories of abusive comments saw even sharper rises, with violent threats and hate speech quadrupling during the same period.
The report cites specific examples of gendered and racist abuse directed at lawmakers like US representatives Jasmine Crockette of Texas and Byron Daniels of Florida. These comments were not taken down by Meta. The CCDH researchers also found that threats against President Trump more than doubled in the six months after Meta overhauled its rules.
To assess the impact of these rule changes, CCDH’s researchers chose 100 members of the House of Representatives made up of the 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats with the most followers on Facebook. Then the researchers scraped nearly 8 million comments on Facebook posts made by those lawmakers in the six months before and after Meta’s policy changes.
The researchers used an AI system trained to identify comments that were likely to violate Meta’s current policies in three areas: violence and incitement, hateful conduct, or bullying and harassment. Comments that violated Meta’s policies around 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.
A Meta spokesperson told WIRED that the company could not address the report’s claims directly without seeing the research in its entirety. However, Senator John Curtis, a Republican from Utah and a member of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, said in a statement to CCDH: “When companies reduce oversight in areas like violence, hate, and harassment, it should not be any surprise to see those harms increase.”
The data collected by CCDH researchers is echoed in Meta’s own transparency reports from 2025, which show how the company cut its proactive content moderation enforcement by roughly half in the months following its policy changes. “The surge in abuse and the collapse in enforcement track one another almost exactly,” the report’s authors write.
Experts say that extremist content like the comments covered in this report is the type of content that has been shown to be the most engaging on social media platforms. By divesting from content moderation, platforms are amplifying abusive content, saving on the ‘expense’ of keeping their platform safe, and falling into political lockstep with an administration that claims content moderation is censorship.
The rising threats against lawmakers have real-world implications. The Capitol Police cited increased threats to politicians in March when seeking a budget increase. Former US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was the lawmaker in the report who faced the most abusive comments, referenced threats to her life as one of the reasons she stepped away from public life.
“We’ve seen a horrifying trend of political violence, from the latest attack on the president to the murder of Charlie Kirk to the assassination of Melissa Hortman and her husband,” Imran Ahmed, the CEO of Center for Countering Digital Hate, tells WIRED. “Lawmakers are canceling town halls; they’re moving them off online. Election officials are leaving the job. Representatives are saying in public the fear of being targeted shapes how they vote. I don’t see how publishing, amplifying, and failing to enforce your own rules against this kind of harassment, threats, and identity-based hate can in any way be portrayed as a moral act. I think it takes incredible levels of duplicity to claim that.”
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