Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately.
Pixelfed is an open-source, community funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is the largest Pixelfed server, which was launched in 2018 but has gained renewed attention over the last week.
Bluesky user AJ Sadauskas originally posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted by Meta; 404 Media then also tried to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook. It was immediately deleted.
Pixelfed is experiencing a surge in user signups in recent days, after Meta announced that it would loosen its rules to allow users to call LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill” amid a host of other changes that shift the company overtly to the right. Meta and Instagram have also leaned heavily into AI-generated content. Pixelfed announced earlier Monday that it is launching an iOS app later this week.
Pixelfed said Sunday it is “seeing unprecedented levels of traffic to pixelfed.social.”
Over the weekend, Daniel Supernault, the creator of Pixelfed, published a “declaration of fundamental rights and principles for ethical digital platforms, ensuring privacy, dignity, and fairness in online spaces.” The open source charter, which has been adopted by Pixelfed and can be adopted by other platforms, contains sections titled “right to privacy,” “freedom from surveillance,” “safeguards against hate speech,” “strong protections for vulnerable communities,” and “data portability and user agency.”
“Pixelfed is a lot of things, but one thing it is not, is an opportunity for VC or others to ruin the vibe. I've turned down VC funding and will not inject advertising of any form into the project,” Supernault wrote on Mastodon. “Pixelfed is for the people, period.”
Meta deleted nonbinary and trans themes for its Messenger app this week, around the same time that the company announced it would change its rules to allow users to declare that LGBTQ+ people are “mentally ill,” 404 Media has learned.
Meta’s Messenger app allows users to change the color scheme and design of their chat windows with different themes. For example, there is currently a “Squid Game” theme, a “Minecraft” theme, a “Basketball” theme, and a “Love” theme, among many others.
These themes regularly change, but for the last few years they have featured a “trans” theme and a “nonbinary” theme, which had color schemes that matched the trans pride flag and the non-binary pride flag. Meta did not respond to a request for comment about why the company removed these themes, but the change comes right as Mark Zuckerberg’s company is publicly and loudly shifting rightward to more closely align itself with the views of the incoming Donald Trump administration. 404 Media reported Thursday that many employees are protesting the anti LGBTQ+ changes and that “it’s total chaos internally at Meta right now” because of the changes.
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The trans theme was announced for Pride Month in June 2021, and the nonbinary theme was announced in June 2022 in blog posts that highlighted Meta’s apparent support for trans and nonbinary people. Both of these posts are no longer online.
“This June and beyond, we want people to #ConnectWithPride because when we show up as the most authentic version of ourselves, we can truly connect with people,” the post announcing the trans theme originally said. “Starting today, in support of the LGBTQ+ community and allies, Messenger is launching new expression features and celebrating the artists and creators who not only developed them, but inspire us each and every day.”
The blog post announcing the nonbinary theme, meanwhile, read “Messenger is committed to building the safest private messaging experience that gives the growing LBGTQ+ community and its allies a trusted space to open up with confidence. Today, we’re celebrating International Non-Binary People’s Day through the release of new expression tools, including an all-new non-binary chat theme, sticker pack and word effects, in addition to new shortcuts available to easily access these new features.” The blog post featured a discussion between nonbinary members of Meta’s staff and a member of the LGBTQ+ rights organization The Trevor Project.
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows these posts were both still live as of September 2024, the last time the announcement posts were archived. The chat themes that they were announcing were deleted this week, according to internal information obtained by 404 Media. We also confirmed that the themes are no longer active on Messenger. A “Pride” rainbow theme is still active.
Two current Meta employees told 404 Media that the nonbinary and trans themes were “retired” this week. A code change notice from this week obtained by 404 Media reads “Retire theme Transgender … this diff will retire the theme Transgender on both Messenger and Instagram.” A separate internal post by an employee reads “Does anyone know what happened to the non-binary themes in Messenger/IG and where out public facing content supporting this feature went? Is this related to the updated guidelines? Have there been any other related gender or LGBTQ design updates?”
One employee said these were deleted “without explanation or justification.”
The deletion of these themes coincides with Meta’s announcement of new content moderation rules that specifically allow for the targeting of LGBTQ+ people and, specifically, trans and nonbinary people. Internal guidelines obtained by both The Intercept and Platformer show that Meta is now telling content moderators that statements like "A trans person isn't a he or she, it's an it," and “Trans people aren't real. They're mentally ill,” and “This whole nonbinary thing is made up. Those people don't exist, they're just in need of some therapy" no longer violate its rules, according to Platformer. It also says, for example, “‘Tranny’ is no longer a designated slur and is now non-violating,” the Intercept reported.
“I’ve never seen morale this low. Most folks expected some change with the incoming administration’s hostility to gay and trans people but this just feels vicious, almost gleeful,” one current Meta employee told 404 Media about all of the changes at the company. “Some folks are cheerleading the change but most of the vocal people are against it. I’ve even heard open talk from coworkers mulling over resignations over this.”
Google and Microsoft are the latest tech companies to donate to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration. Each company contributed $1 million to the fund — the same amount pledged by Meta, Amazon, Sam Altman, and Tim Cook.
In a statement to CNBC, Karan Bhatia, Google’s global head of government affairs and public policy, said the company is supporting the inauguration “with a livestream on YouTube and a direct link on our homepage,” as well as with a financial contribution. The donation may be part of Google’s larger strategy to win over Trump, who has threatened to break up the tech giant or shut it down altogether.
Microsoft, which is also giving $1 million, previously contributed $500,000 to Trump’s first inauguration and donated the same amount to President Joe Biden’s inauguration fund, a company spokesperson told CNBC. Per CNBC, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has met with Trump multiple times, and was involved in negotiations over acquiring TikTok in 2020, when Trump tried to ban the app in the US.
Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s appeasement of the incoming president continues this morning. Last month, the tech mogul donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund. This morning, he’s giving him a policy gift (no, not that one) with the removal of Facebook and Instagram’s fact checkers, explaining that those fact checkers were biased and that things are just different now—or at least they will be on January 20.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg says in a video posted to Facebook this morning. Framing the issue as a debate from “the last several years,” Zuckerberg continues, “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political.” Zuckerberg says there is other "legitimately bad stuff out there” like “drugs, terrorism, child exploitation" that needs to be moderated out, but that the systems they have in place make too many mistakes and end up censoring people who don’t deserve it. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point to once again prioritizing speech,” he says, vowing to “restore free expression.”
The Facebook founder claims that while they tried to address the misinformation problem that “legacy media” kept harping on during the first Trump administration, the fact checkers were politically biased and thus the juice just wasn’t worth the squeeze. Now, Facebook and Instagram will instead switch to a style similar to Twitter/X (things are going great over there) where people can add context to false or misleading posts via Community Notes. Zuckerberg goes on to say they’re simplifying rules on topics like, say, “immigration and gender” because the existing policies are “just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” The efforts to be inclusive, he says, have only shut out people “with different ideas” and “it’s gone too far.” (All the way to the White House!)
Of course, while Zuckerberg, who looks increasingly like a Paul brother, stops short of using a term like "political correctness” it’s clear from the video that there is a political agenda at play. Weeding out one political belief does not make a system apolitical; it just makes it political in a different way. And like Elon Musk before him, Zuckerberg is moving his content moderation teams from California to Texas, opining it’s helpful to do this in a place where “there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” Zuckerberg’s final point is that he plans to work with President Trump to fight other world leaders who want to censor Americans, at one point (hilariously) saying that Europe’s laws around censorship make it “difficult to build anything innovative there.” And the country of China had the gall to block Facebook, which Zuckerberg seems to take offense to. Facebook was never apolitical—there’s a strong argument to be made that they significantly helped Trump win the first time—but Zuck is right about one thing. This certainly feels like a new era.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency building is seen on August 21st, 2024, in Washington, DC. | Photo by Tierney L. Cross / Getty Images
An alliance of grassroots environmental groups could lose $60 million in federal funding after calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
The Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) was named one of the Environmental Protection Agency’s “grantmakers” more than a year ago, putting it in charge of distributing subgrants for locally led environmental projects. But out of 11 of the EPA’s grantmakers, the CJA is the only one that has yet to receive any funding. The group has faced a barrage of attacks for publicly opposing the Israel-Hamas war, and some EPA staffers say the group has been singled out as a result.
“We have been deeply disappointed to witness EPA’s current withholding of $60 million to the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), the only one of the eleven grantees that courageously spoke out against the environmental toll and human rights violations in Palestine,” a group of anonymous EPA and Department of Energy employees wrote in an open letter in December.
The money could disappear if it isn’t dispersed before President-elect Donald Trump steps into office. Trump has said he would rescind unspent funds from the Inflation Reduction Act that set aside money for the grants. And if his second term is anything like his first, he’s likely to gut the EPA and roll back environmental protections.
With a deregulatory agenda at the national level, local efforts become even more crucial to safeguarding Americans’ air, water, and climate. It’s those kinds of grassroots initiatives that the EPA’s grantmakers are supposed to support and what’s at risk if the agency doesn’t disburse the funds before it’s too late.
“What this would do is further strip away funds that our communities have been counting on,” says CJA executive director KD Chavez. “We need people to be resourced so that at least on a local level they can do clean up projects, they can have air quality monitoring,” Chavez says, citing examples of how the money might be used.
Money for the EPA’s Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program came from the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $369 billion for clean energy and climate action. The 11 grantmakers include universities and nonprofit organizations charged with doling out a total of $600 million to locally led environmental projects.
The CJA, in particular, was chosen to distribute subgrants to EPA regions 8–10, which encompass most of the Western US. It’s also the national grantmaker responsible for outreach to tribal communities. The CJA says it has already spent $1.6 million from its own operational budget to get the organizational infrastructure in place needed to allow community groups to apply for subgrants. It’s supposed to receive $50 million for those subgrants, plus an additional $10 million for technical capacity.
As of January 3rd, only $461 million of the funding from the grantmaking program had been awarded, according to data on the EPA website, leaving the rest of the funds vulnerable to the incoming Trump administration.
“There are questions we have about the singling out of us as an organization. Why have we been singled out as anti-American? Is it because we’re led by working class people, Black Indigenous, and people of color communities?” Chavez says.
Over the past year, conservative media and some Republican lawmakers have accused the CJA of being “radicals,” antisemitic, and “Anti-American” for its stance on the Israel-Hamas war. Even before the EPA announced its selection of 11 grantmakers, the CJA had released a statement in October 2023 calling on President Joe Biden and Congress to demand a ceasefire by Israel and Hamas.
“I was surprised to learn that $50 million has been designated for Climate Justice Alliance, a group which explicitly publishes a ‘free Palestine’ section on its website. On the website, there are dozens of antisemitic and alarming images,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) said to former EPA administrator Michael Regan when he testified before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee in July of last year. (Regan stepped down from his post in December.)
The CJA has published its ceasefire statement on its website. “We call on Biden and the US Congress to support an immediate end to the violence by publicly demanding a ceasefire within the region. We stand firmly on the side of peace and support the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, decolonization and life,” the statement says.
“At our core CJA has always been anti war and pro communities,” Chavez says. “We are just collateral damage in a war against regulations,” they add.
The group has also caught flak for its environmental advocacy. A letter from Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Buddy Carter (R-GA) to Regan last May accuses the CJA of supporting “partisan, and in some cases extreme, environmental activism” including “mass organization of climate alarmism protests” and the “litigation of fossil fuel projects.” The letter similarly castigates other grantmakers chosen by the EPA, but the CJA has faced more heat as protests in the US against the war in Gaza gained momentum.
The letter published by EPA and DOE staffers last month (first reported on by The Intercept) urges the agencies to “end their collaboration with Israel until there is a permanent ceasefire” and “release all designated federal funds to Climate Justice Alliance.” It says the funding is needed for Indigenous communities and other groups that have historically been “left out” of environmental protections.
According to Chavez, the EPA told the CJA in a meeting in September that it was under investigation by the agency’s office of general counsel (OGC) without any explanation as to why. The group says the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights then told the group to expect funding by January 6th — even though grantmakers were initially anticipated to be able to start doling out subgrants in the summer of 2024.
The EPA didn’t verify the CJA’s claims or answer specific questions from The Verge about an investigation into the CJA. “EPA continues to review the grant for the Climate Justice Alliance,” EPA spokesperson Nick Conger said in an email to The Verge. “EPA continues to work through its rigorous process to obligate the funds under the Inflation Reduction Act, including the Thriving Communities Grantmakers program.” The agency is “on track” to award more than 90 percent of the funding by the end of the Biden administration, Conger added.
When The Verge asked the EPA last year how it chose grantmakers for the program, Regan said in a call with reporters that they each “demonstrated a very strong governance structure that creates accountability” and that the agency selected the 11 “knowing that they would be able to operationalize these resources in a way that the communities that need these resources the most would absolutely get them.”
Earlier this week, Meta executive Connor Hayes told the Financial Times that the company is going to roll out AI character profiles on Instagram and Facebook that “exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do … they’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.”
This quote got a lot of attention because it was yet another signal that a “social network” ostensibly made up of human beings and designed for humans to connect with each other is once again betting its future on distinctly inhuman bots designed with the express purpose to pollute its platforms with AI-generated slop, just like spammers are already doing and just like Mark Zuckerberg recently told investors the explicit plan is. In the immediate aftermath of the Financial Times story, people began to notice the exact types of profiles that Hayes was talking about, and assumed that Meta had begun enacting its plan.
But the Meta controlled, AI-generated Instagram and Facebook profiles going viral right now have been on the platform for well over a year and all of them stopped posting 10 months ago after users almost universally ignored them. Many of the AI-generated profiles that Meta created and announced have been fully deleted; the ones that remain have not posted new content since April 2024, though their chat functionality continues to work.
Peoples’ understandable aversion to the idea of Meta-controlled AI bots taking up space on Facebook and Instagram has led them to believe that these existing bots are the new ones “announced” by Hayes to the Financial Times. In Hayes’ quote, he says that Meta ultimately envisions releasing tools that allow users to create these characters and profiles, and for those AI profiles to live alongside normal profiles. So Meta has not actually released anything new, but the news cycle has led people to go find Meta’s already existing AI-generated profiles and to realize how utterly terrible they are.
After this article was originally published, Liz Sweeney, a Meta spokesperson, told 404 Media that "there is confusion" on the internet between what Hayes told the Financial Times and what is being talked about online now and Meta is deleting those accounts now. 404 Media confirmed that many of the profiles that were live at the time this article was published have since been deleted.
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