Larry Ellison has been at Donald Trump’s side since he took office last month. The man Trump referred to as “one of the most serious players in the world” was front row at the inauguration, and then watched as the president signed an executive order on artificial intelligence — a major business interest for tech giant Oracle.

And Ellison, Oracle’s billionaire co-founder, was sitting next to Rupert Murdoch in early February when Trump created a fund to facilitate the purchase of TikTok. His presence was no accident.

Last month, after the Supreme Court upheld a law banning TikTok, Oracle emerged as a leader in the race to take control of the Chinese-owned short-form video platform.

While the campaign against TikTok was led by China hawks in Washington, it was the ire of pro-Israel activists that perhaps best explains why Oracle is such a natural choice to take over the social media app.

The campaign to ban the app kicked into high gear after Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel. The timing spurred talk that the push for a ban wasn’t just about American national security, but Israel’s too. Politicians even tied their campaigns against TikTok to alleged Hamas propaganda being hosted on the platform.

Oracle, which had already taken control of some of TikTok’s day-to-day operations, had taken a firm pro-Israel stance and, according to an Intercept investigation, clamped down on pro-Palestine activism inside the company.

Last November, Israeli American Oracle CEO Safra Catz told an Israeli business news outlet, “For employees, it’s clear: if you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here—this is a free country.”

Collaborations between the company and Israeli government agencies have been wide-ranging, encompassing everything from direct technology work with the military to software intended to help Israel with public relations — including, according to internal company messages, on social media platforms like TikTok.

Critics of Israel’s war on Gaza exist within Oracle’s 160,000 global staff, though they have faced repression and punishment related to their stances. The dissent and the backlash, half a dozen Oracle employees told The Intercept, was part of an internal crisis for pro-Palestinian staffers at the tech giant over its unwavering support of Israel.

Oracle employees who spoke with The Intercept described an environment of fear, and half a dozen said they were seeking to leave the company.

“The environment is horrible, people are terrified to even mention Palestine,” one employee, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, told The Intercept. “I cannot stand it anymore.”

“People are terrified to even mention Palestine.”

Sixty-eight Oracle employees signed an open letter last year criticizing the company’s partnerships with Israel. Many have also raised alarms about what they said were biases in certain company programs, including the removal of avenues for staff to donate money to pro-Palestinian causes.

According to multiple Oracle staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihoods, one employee was terminated for allegedly violating the company’s branding and Slack policies after they created a combined Palestinian Oracle logo on a watermelon — a symbol of Palestinian solidarity — that was posted in a Slack channel and put on social media.

While companies such as Google and Amazon have been criticized for their work with the Israeli military and suppression of pro-Palestinian voices, employees and observers told The Intercept that Oracle stands out for its steadfast commitment to Israel.

“We have been seeing a theme across the tech sector where pro-Palestinian voices inside companies have been targeted and repressed for their actions,” said Eric Sype, U.S. national organizer for 7amleh, also known as the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement. “This shows the influence that the right-wing Israeli government has on the tech sector in Silicon Valley.”

Ties to Israel

Oracle, a Texas-based tech giant that rose to prominence with software and services related to database management, has a rich history with Israel — one of several of the company’s nation-state clients.

Both Catz and Ellison have close relationships with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Catz met with Netanyahu a few months before the war on Gaza began to discuss the expansion of Oracle’s work in Israel. And Ellison, a Republican megadonor in the U.S., once offered Netanyahu a place on Oracle’s board of directors and invited him to visit his private Hawaiian island.

Oracle’s initial high-profile deal with the Israeli government came in 2021, when it became the first multinational tech company to offer cloud services in the country. The database giant established a $319 million data center in Jerusalem for the project.

Not all of Oracle’s work in Israel, though, is publicized. Even as it announced its cloud computing deal, Oracle was working on a four-year highly confidential project with the Israeli Air Force called “Project Menta,” according to screenshots of Slack postings obtained by The Intercept. (Neither Oracle nor the Israeli Ministry of Defense responded to requests for comment.)

Project Menta, which was previously undisclosed, has allowed Israel’s air force to do a “bunch of important military stuff that we can’t share with you,” Shimon Levy, head of communications at Oracle Israel, wrote to colleagues on Slack in December 2021, according to three internal sources. Levy appended a sword emoji to his message.

In 2022, Levy also announced in the same channel that the Israeli military’s Unit 81 — essentially a technology solutions division housed within the country’s intelligence apparatus — was in the final stage of a three-year program with Oracle to expedite procurement by allowing every soldier to make their own military purchase requests.

That same year, Oracle hosted a hackathon with the Israeli military to “develop technical solutions to acute social challenges.”

“Look at those faces!” Levy wrote in the post accompanied by a photo from the event. “We’re there to support the soldiers in their mission to make the world a better place, using Oracle’s technology!”

Oracle and the War on Gaza

Immediately after the attacks of October 7, 2023, Oracle publicly declared its support for Israel. Catz also demanded the inscription “Oracle Stands with Israel” be displayed on all the company’s screens, in more than 180 countries.

Throughout the war, company officials continued to tout their support for Israel — and discuss incipient and ongoing projects working with the Israeli government. At one point, in Slack, Levy remarked that the Israeli Ministry of Defense was “a demanding customer with very high standards.” 

A month into the war, Levy took to the company Slack to laud the Oracle employees that were leading an “important volunteering initiative to develop and operate a unique tool” for Israeli public relations on social media. The project, called “Words of Iron,” was developed in collaboration with Israeli ministries to help the country elevate pro-Israel content and counter critical narratives on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter.

In February 2024, the Israeli military cyber department and Oracle collaborated on another hackathon “to find tech solutions for rehabilitating Israeli settlements near Gaza using Oracle’s technology,” Levy wrote, according to internal Slack messages. Levy also announced that the company had donated bags with medical and environmental supplies to Israel Defense Forces soldiers, valued at half a million dollars.

Last summer, Catz attended a private lobbying meeting with U.S. senators to advocate for the continuation of weapon shipments to Israel. And, in the fall, Oracle announced it was partnering with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, one of Israel’s largest defense companies, on an AI project to provide “warfighters with quick, actionable insights in the battlespace.”

“What’s pretty astounding to me is how flagrant the complicity is,” said Marwa Fatafta, MENA policy and advocacy director at Access Now. “They are definitely taking advantage of the impunity that Israel enjoys. There are no consequences.”

By the time Catz returned to Israel in November for her second trip since the war broke out, some employees were feeling deeply uncomfortable in the workspace.

On LinkedIn, Hani Risheq, director of enterprise architecture at Oracle UK posted: “Can any of the 155K+ worldwide Oracle employees with a different opinion than that of Catz’s voice their opinion without being penalised or even shown the door?”

Cutting Help to Palestinians

Meanwhile, as Israel began its bombing and full-scale invasion of Gaza, some employees said that the company was restraining support for Palestinians.

Like many companies, Oracle operates a program to match employee donations to charitable causes. As the war raged, relief organizations like Medical Aid for Palestinians and UNRWA were taken off the internal giving page and no longer listed as accepting matching donations, four employees told The Intercept.

Oracle employees told The Intercept that the company chalked up the disappearance of the Palestinian-oriented charities to changes in policy that focused on education, environment, and health — though the Oracle employees pointed out some of the charities in question did focus on those areas. When they asked for the charities to be reinstated, they received no response.

In Catz’s public statements to Israeli media, she referred to pro-Palestinian rights groups as “brainwashing organizations,” adding, “They don’t even know the facts.”

Activists disagree with Oracle’s blanket statements surrounding Israel’s war on Gaza.

“Right now, you have to be living under a rock to claim ignorance,” said Fatafta of Access Now. “There is no single big tech company, its CEOs or executive management, that can claim a lack of knowledge about what has happened in Gaza.”

In the press, the company has had no compunction about clearly taking sides, dismissing the idea that its work with Israel amid the onslaught against Gaza could cause problems with clients in other parts of the world. “Absolutely not,” said Yael Har Even, deputy CEO of Oracle Israel, when asked about the possibility. “Safra always says — the U.S. first, the second country is Israel, and after that the whole world.”

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As the Trump administration and its cadre of Silicon Valley machine-learning evangelists attempt to restructure the administrative state, the IRS is preparing to purchase advanced artificial intelligence hardware, according to procurement materials reviewed by The Intercept.

With Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency installing itself at the IRS amid a broader push to replace federal bureaucracy with machine-learning software, the tax agency’s computing center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, will soon be home to a state-of-the-art Nvidia SuperPod AI computing cluster. According to the previously unreported February 5 acquisition document, the setup will combine 31 separate Nvidia servers, each containing eight of the company’s flagship Blackwell processors designed to train and operate artificial intelligence models that power tools like ChatGPT.

The hardware has not yet been purchased and installed, nor is a price listed, but SuperPod systems reportedly start at $7 million. The setup described in the contract materials notes that it will include a substantial memory upgrade from Nvidia.

Though small compared to the massive AI-training data centers deployed by companies like OpenAI and Meta, the SuperPod is still a powerful and expensive setup using the most advanced technology offered by Nvidia, whose chips have facilitated the global machine-learning spree. While the hardware can be used in many ways, it’s marketed as a turnkey means of creating and querying an AI model. Last year, the MITRE Corporation, a federally funded military R&D lab, acquired a $20 million SuperPod setup to train bespoke AI models for use by government agencies, touting the purchase as a “massive increase in computing power” for the United States.

How exactly the IRS will use its SuperPod is unclear. An agency spokesperson said the IRS had no information to share on the supercomputer purchase, including which presidential administration ordered it. A 2024 report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration identified 68 different AI-related projects underway at the IRS; the Nvidia cluster is not named among them, though many were redacted.

But some clues can be gleaned from the purchase materials. “The IRS requires a robust and scalable infrastructure that can handle complex machine learning (ML) workloads,” the document explains. “The Nvidia Super Pod is a critical component of this infrastructure, providing the necessary compute power, storage, and networking capabilities to support the development and deployment of large-scale ML models.”

The document notes that the SuperPod will be run by the IRS Research, Applied Analytics, and Statistics division, or RAAS, which leads a variety of data-centric initiatives at the agency. While no specific uses are cited, it states that this division’s Compliance Data Warehouse project, which is behind this SuperPod purchase, has previously used machine learning for automated fraud detection, identity theft prevention, and generally gaining a “deeper understanding of the mechanisms that drive taxpayer behavior.”

“The IRS has probably more proprietary data than most agencies that is totally untapped.”

It’s unclear from the document whether the SuperPod purchase had been planned under the Biden administration or if it represents a new initiative of the Trump administration.

Some funding from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was earmarked for upgrading IRS technology generally, said Travis Thompson, a tax attorney with Boutin Jones with an expertise in IRS AI strategy. But “the IRS has been going toward AI for quite some time prior to IRA funding,” Thompson explained. “They didn’t have enough money to properly enforce the tax code, they were looking for ways to do more with less.” A June 2024 Government Accountability Office report suggested the IRS use artificial intelligence-based software to retrieve “hundreds of billions of dollars [that] are potentially missing from what should be collected in taxes each year.”

Thompson added that the agency is ripe for machine-learning training because of the mountain of personal and financial data it sits atop. “The IRS has probably more proprietary data than most agencies that is totally untapped. When you look at something like this Nvidia cluster and training machine learning algorithms going forward, it makes perfect sense, because they have the data there. AI needs data. It needs lots of it. And it needs it quickly. And the IRS has it.”

The purchase comes at a crossroads for U.S. governance of artificial intelligence tech. In Trump’s first term, the RAAS office was assigned “responsibility for monitoring and overseeing AI at the IRS” under Executive Order 13960, which he signed shortly before leaving office in 2020. This executive order put an emphasis on the “responsible,” “safe” implementation of AI by the United States — an approach that has fallen out of favor by American tech barons who now advocate for the breakneck development of these technologies unburdened by consideration of ethics or risk. One of Trump’s first moves following his inauguration was reversing a Biden administration executive order calling for greater AI safety guardrails in government use.

Many of the AI industry for whom “safe AI” is now anathema have become close allies of the new Trump White House, such as Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. This wing of Silicon Valley has reportedly pushed the new administration to leverage artificial intelligence to help dismantle the administrative state via automation.

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported Musk’s liquidators had arrived at the IRS, an agency long the target of disparagement and distortion by Trump and Republican allies. Days before, the New York Times reported, “Representatives from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have sought information about the tax collector’s information technology, with a goal of automating more work to replace the need for human staff members.”

The IRS has in recent years increasingly turned to AI for automated fraud detection and chatbot-based support services — including through collaboration with Nvidia — but a new Nvidia supercomputer could also be a boon to those interested in shrinking the agency’s human headcount as much as possible. A February 8 report by the Washington Post quoted an unnamed federal official who described Musk’s end goal as “replacing the human workforce with machines,” and that “Everything that can be machine-automated will be. And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”

Musk underlings are reportedly contemplating replacing humans at the Department of Education with a large language-based chatbot, as well.

Wired previously reported that Musk loyalist Thomas Shedd, placed in a directorship within the General Services Administration, has talked of an “AI-first” agenda for Trump’s second term; DOGE staffers have already reportedly turned to Microsoft’s Azure AI platform for advice on slashing programs. While the Nvidia SuperPod couldn’t on its own replicate services like those provided by Microsoft, it is powerful enough to train AI models based on government data.

Thompson told The Intercept that efforts to slash the federal workforce and more aggressively deploy artificial intelligence systems fit hand-in-glove.

“I firmly believe that rooted behind the reduction in the human workforce that seems to be goal of current administration, there’s an overarching goal there to implement more technology-based systems in order to do the jobs,” he explained. “If you’re going to reduce your workforce, something has to pick up the slack. Something has to do the job.”

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Tens of millions of people face the loss of an internet service they use to consume information from around the world. Their government says the block is for their own good, necessitated by threats to national security. The internet service is dangerous, they say, a tool of foreign meddling and a menace to the national fabric — though they furnish little evidence. A situation like this, historically, is the kind of thing the U.S. government protests in clear terms.

When asked, for instance, about Chinese censorship of Twitter in 2009, President Barack Obama was unequivocal. “I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.” When the government of Nigeria disconnected its people from Twitter in 2021, the State Department blasted the move, with spokesperson Ned Price declaring, “Unduly restricting the ability of Nigerians to report, gather, and disseminate opinions and information has no place in a democracy.”

But with the Supreme Court approving on Friday a law that would shut off access to TikTok, the U.S. is poised to conduct the exact kind of internet authoritarianism it has spent decades warning the rest of the world about.

Since the advent of the global web, this has been the standard line from the White House, State Department, Congress, and an infinitude of think tanks and NGOs: The internet is a democracy machine. You turn it loose, and it generates freedom ex nihilo. The more internet you have, the more freedom you have.

The State Department in particular seldom misses an opportunity to knock China, Iran, and other faraway governments for blocking their people from reaching the global communications grid — moves justified by those governments as necessary for national safety.

In 2006, the State Department presented the Bush administration’s Global Internet Freedom strategy of “defending Internet freedom by advocating the availability of the widest possible universe of content.” In a 2010 speech, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cautioned that “countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century.” She emphasized that the department sought to encourage the flow of foreign internet data into China “because we believe it will further add to the dynamic growth and the democratization” there.

The U.S. has always viewed the internet with something akin to national pride, and for decades has condemned attempts by authoritarian governments — especially China’s — to restrict access to the worldwide exchange of unfettered information. China has become synonymous with internet censorship for snuffing whole websites or apps out of existence with only the thinnest invocation of national security.

But after years of championing “Digital Democracy,” “the Global Village,” and an “American Information Superhighway” shuttling liberalism and freedom to every computer it touches, the U.S. is preparing a dramatic about face. In a move of supreme irony, it will attempt to shield its citizens from Chinese government influence by becoming itself more like the government of China. American internet users must now get accustomed to sweeping censorship in the name of national security as an American strategy, not one inherent to our “foreign adversaries.”

In a move of supreme irony, the U.S. will attempt to shield its citizens from Chinese government influence by becoming itself more like the government of China.

For decades, China has justified its ban against American internet products on the grounds that the likes of Twitter and Instagram represent a threat to Chinese state security and a corrupting influence on Chinese society. That logic has now been seamlessly co-opted by U.S politicians who see China as the great global evil, but with little acknowledgment of how their rhetoric matches that of their enemy.

“Authoritarian and illiberal states,” President Joe Biden’s State Department warned soon after he signed the TikTok ban bill into law, “are seeking to restrict human rights online and offline through the misuse of the Internet and digital technologies” by “siloing the Internet” and “suppressing dissent through Internet and telecommunications shutdowns, virtual blackouts, restricted networks, and blocked websites.”

While TikTok’s national security threat has never been made public — alleged details discussed by Congress remain classified — those who advocate banning the app make clear their concern isn’t merely cybersecurity but also free speech. The Chinese Communist Party “could also use TikTok to propagate videos that support party-friendly politicians or exacerbate discord in American society,” former GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher and Sen. Marco Rubio warned in a 2022 Washington Post op-ed. Their argument perfectly mimicked unspecified threats to Chinese “national unity” that country has cited to defend its blocking of American internet services.

“It’s highly addictive and destructive and we’re seeing troubling data about the corrosive impact of constant social media use, particularly on young men and women here in America,” Gallagher told NBC in 2023.

If politicians are conscious of this contradiction between declarations of America as the home of digital democracy and the rising American firewall, there’s little acknowledgment. In a 2024 opinion piece for Newsweek (“Mr. Xi, Tear Down This Firewall”), Rep. John Moolenaar decried China’s “dystopian” practice of censoring foreign information: “The Great Firewall inhibits contact between Chinese citizens and the outside world. Information is stopped from flowing into China and the Chinese people are not allowed to get information out. Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube are blocked.”

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling Friday, Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, announced he “commends” the decision, one he believes “will keep our country safe.” His language echoes that of a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, who once told reporters the country’s national blockade of American websites was similarly necessary to “safeguard the public.”

It’s unclear whether they see irony in the scores of Americans now flocking to VPN software to bypass a potential national TikTok ban — a technique the State Department has long promoted abroad for those living under repressive regimes.

Nor does there seem to be any awareness of how effortlessly the national security argument deployed against TikTok could be turned against any major American internet company. If the U.S. believes TikTok is a clear and present danger to its citizens because it uses secret algorithms, cooperates with spy agencies, changes speech policies under political pressure, and conducts dragnet surveillance and data harvesting against its clueless users, what does that say about how the rest of the world should view Facebook, YouTube, or X?

To his credit, Gallagher is open about the extent to which the anti-TikTok movement is based less on principle than brinkmanship. The national ideals of open access to information and unbridled speech remain, to Gallagher, but subordinate to the principle of “reciprocity,” as he’s put it. “It’s worth remembering that our social media applications are not allowed in China,” he said in a 2024 New York Times interview. “There’s just a basic lack of reciprocity, and your Chinese citizens don’t have access to them. And yet we allow Chinese government officials to go all over YouTube, Facebook and X spreading lies about America.” The notion that foreign lies — China’s, or anyone else’s — should be countered with state censorship, rather than counter-speech, marks an ideological abandonment of the past 30 years of American internet statecraft.

“Prior to this ban, the U.S. had consistently and rightfully so condemned when other nations banned communications platforms as fundamentally anti-democratic,” said David Greene, senior staff attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We now have lost much of our moral authority to advance democracy and the free flow of information around the world.”

Should TikTok actually become entirely unplugged from the United States, it may grow more difficult for the country to proselytize for an open internet. So too will it grow more difficult for the U.S. to warn of blocking apps or sites as something our backward adversaries, fearful of our American freedoms and open way of life, do out of desperation.

That undesirable online speech can simply be disappeared by state action was previously dismissed as anti-democratic folly: In a 2000 speech, Bill Clinton praised the new digital century in which “liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem,” comparing China’s “crack down on the internet” to “trying to nail Jello to the wall.” Futile though it may remain, the hammer at least no longer appears un-American.

The post Washington’s TikTok Ban Hypocrisy: Internet Censorship Is Good, Now appeared first on The Intercept.

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A webpage on the State of Louisiana’s official site appears to be advertising “animal porn Porn Videos.” The online home of the Federal Judicial Center offers “free how to sex videos,” with a closed captioning feature. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s SimpleReport, identified as an “official website of the United States government” in a banner at the top of the page, provides “Desi Girl Xxx Video sex Videos,” while the City of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, points to “Sexy Beautiful European Porn.”

These are just a few examples of the wide range of U.S. government websites inadvertently directing visitors to hardcore porn content. Other examples can readily be discovered when searching for pornographic keywords like “xxx” and utilizing Google’s “site:” search operator to query only U.S. government domains.

In some cases, the content appears to violate the very laws of the governments whose sites they have taken over. Pages hosted on the State of Louisiana’s official government site that now redirect to porn, for instance, don’t require visitors to provide proof-of-age verification, as is required under Louisiana’s controversial age verification law. The Supreme Court is due this week to hear a case about the constitutionality of age verification laws.

Spammers have in the past exploited the redirection functionalities of government websites to steer traffic to pornographic content — meaning the government sites themselves never actually hosted malicious content. But this recent wave of porn spam appears to be using a more complex technique: uploading to government pages rogue content that transports website visitors to malicious sites.

The new attacks work by tricking the site into attempting to load a nonexistent image. Doing so invokes what’s called an onerror event in the HTML code, which instructs the web browser to pull up a third-party website if an image won’t load. This exploit transports users from the government page to a third-party site, which in turn redirects to yet another site hosting porn and soliciting signups with referral codes and affiliate links. If the user ultimately signs up for an account on one of these sites, the owner may receive a cash incentive.

In some instances, visitors end up on a page to purchase antivirus software from vendors such as McAfee. In response to questions from The Intercept about a specific ad redirected from a Bethlehem city government website, a McAfee spokesperson said the company would “be taking action to remove this ad.” McAfee did not respond to a question about how much the spammer had made through the affiliate program.

The rogue webpages in some cases appear to have been uploaded to the government websites that use older versions of the Kentico content management system, which previously allowed any user to upload files to the website.

Users on forums such as BlackHatWorld, which describes itself as “the global forum and marketplace for cutting edge digital marketing techniques and methods to help you make money in digital marketing today,” routinely advise each other to use the Kentico exploit to inject their content into websites.

Kentico disputed that such attacks point to a vulnerability in its systems, stating that its default settings allow any user to upload file and that it is up to its clients’ website administrators to restrict upload permissions. Kentico confirmed to The Intercept that “media libraries are not secured by default” and that the “default admin account has no password.”

The company pointed The Intercept to its official documentation. “By default, files in media libraries are NOT secured,” the documentation states. “It is up to the user’s discretion when using some feature to read the documentation. E.g. when creating a media library, secure it according given project’s needs and goals.”

None of the impacted government responded to requests for comment; all pages flagged by The Intercept were taken offline shortly after our outreach.

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Meta is now granting its users new freedom to post a wide array of derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities, training materials obtained by The Intercept reveal.

Examples of newly permissible speech on Facebook and Instagram highlighted in the training materials include:

“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”

“Gays are freaks.”

“Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl).”

The changes are part of a broader policy shift that includes the suspension of the company’s fact-checking program. The goal, Meta said Tuesday, is to “allow more speech by lifting restrictions.”

Meta’s newly appointed global policy chief Joel Kaplan described the effort in a statement as a means to fix “complex systems to manage content on our platforms, which are increasingly complicated for us to enforce.”

While Kaplan and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have couched the changes as a way to allow users to engage more freely in ideological dissent and political debate, the previously unreported policy materials reviewed by The Intercept illustrate the extent to which purely insulting and dehumanizing rhetoric is now accepted.

The document provides those working on Meta user content with an overview of the hate speech policy changes, walking them through how to apply the new rules. The most significant changes are accompanied by a selection of “relevant examples” — hypothetical posts marked either “Allow” or “Remove.”

When asked about the new policy changes, Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss referred The Intercept to remarks from Kaplan’s blog post announcing the shift: “We’re 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. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”

Kate Klonick, a content moderation policy expert who spoke to The Intercept, contests Meta’s framing that the new rules as less politicized, given the latitude they provide to attack conservative bogeymen.

“Drawing lines around content moderation was always a political enterprise,” said Klonick, an associate professor of law at St. John’s University and scholar of content moderation policy. “To pretend these new rules are any more ‘neutral’ than the old rules is a farce and a lie.”

She sees the shifts announced by Kaplan — a former White House deputy chief of staff under George W. Bush and Zuckerberg’s longtime liaison to the American right — as “the open political capture of Facebook, particularly because the changes are pandering to a particular party.”

Meta’s public Community Standards page says that even under the new relaxed rules, the company still protects “refugees, migrants, immigrants, and asylum seekers from the most severe attacks” and prohibits “direct attacks” against people on the basis of “race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, and serious disease.” But the instructive examples provided in the internal materials show a wide variety of comments that denigrate people based on these traits that are marked “Allow.”

At times, the provided examples appear convoluted or contradictory. One page notes “generalizations” about any group remain prohibited if they make a comparison to animals or pathogens — such as “All Syrian refugees are rodents.” But comparisons to “filth or feces” are now downgraded from hate speech to a less serious form of “insult,” which violates company rules only if directed at a protected group. According to examples provided by Meta, this change now allows users to broadly dehumanize immigrants with statements like like “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit,” despite language elsewhere in the document that claims “comparisons to subhumanity” remain banned.

The company’s policy around nausea-based hate follows a particularly fine line: “Migrants are no better than vomit” is allowed, according to the materials, while “Muslims make me want to throw up” ought to be removed because it claims a group “causes sickness.”

While general comparisons to animals are still against the rules, many other kinds of broad, hateful stereotyping is now allowed. “ALL behavioral statements (qualified and non-qualified)” are also now no longer against Meta’s rules, the document reads, allowing sweeping generalizations connecting entire races or ethnic groups to criminality or terrorism. The document offers as examples of acceptable racial generalizations: “These damn immigrants can’t be trusted, they’re all criminals,” “I bet Jorge’s the one who stole my backpack after track practice today. Immigrants are all thieves,” and “Japanese are all Yakuza.” It notes, however, that the statement “Black people are all drug dealers” remains prohibited under the new rules.

Other sections of the materials provide examples of forbidden “insults about sexual immorality,” such as “Jewish women are slutty.” But the document also provides ample examples of newly permissible insults aimed at specific gender identities or sexual orientations, including “Gay people are sinners” and “Trans people are immoral.” A post stating “Lesbians are so stupid” would remain prohibited as a “mental insult,” though “Trans people are mentally ill” is marked as allowed.

Generalizations about superiority and inferiority are similarly convoluted, though attacks on immigrants tend to get a pass. Examples of banned content include: “Christian men are totally useless,” “Is it me? Or are all autistic women ugly?” and “Hispanics are as dirty as the ground we walk on.” Meanwhile, “Mexican immigrants are trash!” is now deemed acceptable.

Overall, the restrictions on claims of ethnic or religious supremacy has been eased significantly. The document explains that Meta now allows “statements of superiority as long as the statements do not refer to inferiority of another [protected characteristic] group (a) on the basis of inherent intellectual ability and (b) without support.” Allowable statements under this rule include “Latinos are the best!” and “Black people are superior to all others.” Also now acceptable are comparative claims such as “Black people are more violent than Whites,” “Mexicans are lazier than Asians,” and “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians.” Off-limits, only because it pertains to intellectual ability, is the example “White people are more intelligent than black people.”

But general statements about intellect appear to be permitted if they’re shared with purported evidence. For example, “I just read a statistical study about Jewish people being smarter than Christians. From what I can tell, it’s true!” It’s unclear if one would be required to link to such a study, or merely claim its existence.

Rules around explicit statements of hate have been loosened considerably as well. “Statements of contempt, dislike, and dismissal, such as ‘I hate,’ ‘I don’t care for,’ and ‘I don’t like.’ are now considered non-violating and are allowed,” the document explains. Included as acceptable examples are posts stating “I don’t care for white people” and “I’m a proud racist.”

The new rules also forbid “targeting cursing” at a protected group, which “includes the use of the word ‘fuck’ and its variants.” Cited as an example, a post stating “Ugh, the fucking Jews are at it again” violates the rules simply because it contains an obscenity (the new rules permit the use of “bitch” or motherfucker”).

“Referring to the target as genitalia or anus are now considered non-violating and are allowed.”

Another policy shift: “Referring to the target as genitalia or anus are now considered non-violating and are allowed.” As an example of what is now permissible, Facebook offers up: “Italians are dickheads.”

While many of the examples and underlying policies seem muddled, the document shows clarity around allowing disparaging remarks about transgender people, including children. Noting that “‘Tranny’ is no longer a designated slur and is now non-violating,” the materials provide three examples of speech that should no longer be removed: “Trannies are a problem,” “Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl),” and “Get these trannies out of my school (beneath photo of high school students).”

According to Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Meta’s hate speech protections have historically been well-intentioned, however deeply flawed in practice. “While this has often resulted in over-moderation that I and many others have criticized, these examples demonstrate that Meta’s policy changes are political in nature and not intended to simply allow more freedom of expression,” York said.

Meta has faced international scrutiny for its approach to hate speech, most notably after role that hate speech and other dehumanizing language on Facebook played in fomenting genocide in Myanmar. Following criticism of its mishandling of Myanmar, where the United Nations found Facebook had played a “determining role” in the slaughter of over 650,000 Rohingya Muslims, the company spent years touting its investment in preventing the spread of similar rhetoric in the future.

“The reason many of these lines were drawn where they were is because hate speech often doesn’t stay speech, it turns into real world conduct,” said Klonick, the content moderation scholar.

It’s a premise that Meta purported to share up until this week. “We have a responsibility to fight abuse on Facebook. This is especially true in countries like Myanmar where many people are using the internet for the first time and social media can be used to spread hate and fuel tension on the ground,” wrote company product manager Sara Su in a 2018 blog post. “While we’re adapting our approach to false news given the changing circumstances, our rules on hate speech have stayed the same: it’s not allowed.”

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There are limits to the First Amendment, under established U.S. Supreme Court precedent. There is no constitutional protection for inciting violence, committing perjury, or child pornography, for example. But when the justices convene on Friday to consider legislation that would effectively ban the video-based social media app TikTok in the United States as of January 19, they will be asked to carve out another exception, at least implicitly: for speech that the government says might threaten national security.

Civil liberties groups warned that the TikTok ban cannot be squared with the First Amendment, and that the lower court that upheld the ban in December improperly deferred to the government’s speculative arguments about the app’s potential national security risks.

“Although the government invokes ‘national security’ to justify its sweeping ban, that does not alter the applicable First Amendment standards,” argued a civil liberties coalition, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a brief supporting TikTok and a group of TikTok creators suing to block the law. “In fact, the judiciary has an especially critical role to play in ensuring that the government meets its burden when the government invokes national security.”

The TikTok ban case pits free speech against the specter of foreign threats. And many fear the Supreme Court will tip the balance against the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s millions of American users and creators.

The TikTok ban took shape during the first Trump administration, and it culminated with passage of the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in April 2024. The bill was tacked onto a foreign aid package for Ukraine and Israel, and it passed overwhelmingly in Congress. (President-elect Donald Trump, who endorsed banning TikTok during his first term, reversed course after joining the platform last summer; in a bizarre brief to the Supreme Court, he asked the justices to pause proceedings until he’s back in the White House on January 20, which is unlikely.)

The legislation singles out TikTok by name as a “foreign adversary controlled application” because of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. The government argues that this ownership structure ultimately makes TikTok “subject to the control of the People’s Republic of China” and thus poses “grave national-security threats.” TikTok strenuously rejects this characterization, telling the Supreme Court in its brief that “the Government seeks to prophylactically silence” its more than 170 million users in the U.S. “based on fear that China could someday wield control over [TikTok’s] foreign affiliates.”

Under the law, unless ByteDance sells TikTok by January 19, it will be illegal for third-party vendors like Apple or Google to distribute or maintain the app.

TikTok vowed to challenge the law as unconstitutional, and it filed a federal lawsuit last May, as did a group of TikTok creators. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with the government in early December.

“We recognize that this decision has significant implications for TikTok and its users,” wrote Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, noting that if ByteDance didn’t divest from TikTok, “its platform will effectively be unavailable in the United States, at least for a time.”

TikTok and the creators petitioned the Supreme Court for emergency review, which was quickly granted to squeeze in oral arguments less than two weeks before the sale deadline.

The TikTok case is a battle of framing. By the government’s argument, the ban doesn’t implicate the First Amendment at all, because ByteDance is a foreign company without constitutional rights, and the legislation doesn’t regulate speech on TikTok directly — only who can own and control the platform itself.

“TikTok may continue operating in the United States and presenting the same content from the same users in the same manner if its current owner executes a divestiture that frees the platform from the PRC’s control,” the Biden administration wrote in its brief defending the law. “And TikTok users likewise have no First Amendment right to post content on a platform controlled by a foreign adversary.”

The D.C. Circuit ruled that the First Amendment does apply, rejecting the government’s argument to the contrary, which the judges deemed “ambitious.” ByteDance’s U.S.-based subsidiary, TikTok, Inc., has First Amendment rights, the court held, and “the curation of content on TikTok is a form of speech” under a unanimous Supreme Court decision from last summer.

The three-judge panel — a cross-ideological crew composed of Ginsburg, a Reagan appointee; Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, an Obama nominee; and Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump nominee — found, however, that the TikTok ban didn’t violate the First Amendment, even under the highest level of constitutional scrutiny.

“The Government has offered persuasive evidence demonstrating that the Act is narrowly tailored to protect national security,” Ginsburg wrote. In a concurring opinion, Srinivasan wrote that the TikTok ban was “in step with longstanding restrictions on foreign control of mass communications channels,” such as radio.

The D.C. Circuit’s deference to national security arguments alarmed civil liberties advocates, since the government has acknowledged that TikTok’s potential geopolitical risks to the U.S. are, at least for now, hypothetical.

“Affirming the lower court’s holding would signal a sea change,” argued a group of prominent First Amendment and internet law scholars in a brief, “namely, that the Government need offer only ambiguous evidence and conjecture to support the suppression of free and controversial speech.”

TikTok hawks have offered two primary risk vectors: foreign surveillance and covert influence. Like many websites and apps, TikTok collects a significant amount of data on users — and the company has previously been caught dipping into the data, including to track journalists’ movements and smoke out corporate leakers. The fear is that the Chinese government might access this data too, which could facilitate mass monitoring, blackmail, and espionage against the U.S., as then-hawk Trump wrote in an executive order in 2020.

The government also warns that the Chinese government might leverage TikTok for influence operations targeted at Americans by ordering TikTok to tweak its recommendation algorithm or to censor certain content.

There is no evidence in the public record that the company has coordinated with the Chinese government in either way against the United States. But the D.C. Circuit deferred explicitly to the government’s national security arguments, citing a 2010 decision of the Supreme Court about material support for terrorism, writing that the assessments of the executive branch and Congress about TikTok’s risks were “entitled to significant weight.”

“The list of countries that have banned TikTok should itself be a warning because these countries do not share American commitments to a free and open internet.”

Where the Supreme Court will land is difficult to predict. In the past decade, the court has consistently recognized the importance of protecting online speech, albeit in cases lacking a national security veneer.

But critics worry that allowing a sweeping ban based on predictions rather than more concrete proof of TikTok’s security risks sets a precedent in line with repressive regimes, including, ironically, China.

“The list of countries that have banned TikTok should itself be a warning because these countries do not share American commitments to a free and open internet,” wrote the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in a brief to the Supreme Court joined by Free Press and PEN America.

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