Meta Has Beef with Feminism

Apparently Virginia Woolf is dangerous now. At least that’s what we’re supposed to infer from some ads for a theater play being banned for potentially feminist connections. Feminism being a ‘controversial topic’. Pfff.

As the classic play would ask, who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Meta, apparently.

A Barcelona theatre recently tried to advertise a one-woman adaptation of A Room of One’s Own on Facebook and Instagram. Meta’s automated advertising system rejected the promotion because it detected ‘controversial social topics’ including civil rights, feminism and social reform. The theatre appealed, and Meta eventually said the ad had been removed in error and restored it.

So, before meninist fact checkers jump in to contest my points, just to be clear, Meta hasn’t formally announced that feminism is banned. An automated system made a stupid decision and the company corrected it.

But I think the incident is still worth paying attention to, because there’s something very revealing about a platform being perfectly capable of serving you an endless stream of misogynistic content while an advertisement for a slightly feminist Virginia Woolf play somehow triggers the political equivalent of a fire alarm.

Apparently A Room of One’s Own is where the algorithm needs to draw the line. If they let this one slide, what will we want next? For our creation to be acknowledged?!?!

Free speech, but make it convenient

This becomes even more interesting when you look at what Meta itself has been doing politically.

In January 2025, Meta announced that it would end its US third-party fact-checking programme and move toward a Community Notes model, loosen restrictions around subjects including gender and immigration, and change how political content is distributed on its platforms. Meta presented these changes as a return to free expression and a correction of excessive moderation.

There’s nothing inherently sinister about changing moderation policies. Platforms are allowed to decide how they moderate content, and there are legitimate arguments about where the line between moderation and censorship should sit.

But ‘free speech’ doesn’t exist in a political vacuum.

A platform can loosen restrictions on political speech while simultaneously having automated systems that treat feminism, civil rights and social reform as problematic categories for advertisers.

Even if, somehow, that’s not necessarily a deliberate anti-feminist policy (though I doubt it), it’s still a reminder that the supposedly neutral systems governing what gets amplified, restricted, monetized or classified aren’t actually floating above society.

They’re built by people and their political biases.

Big Tech is getting increasingly cozy with the right

Meta isn’t operating in isolation here.

Over the past couple of years, some of the biggest technology companies and their executives have become increasingly comfortable aligning themselves with the political right. Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program shortly before Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Zuckerberg moved Republican strategist Joel Kaplan into Meta’s top policy role, and the company publicly reframed its moderation changes as part of a broader commitment to free expression. The shift was widely interpreted as an effort to repair relations with Trump and conservatives.

And then there’s Palantir, which takes the whole thing several steps further.

I’ve written before about Alex Karp’s The Technological Republic, the manifesto behind Palantir’s increasingly explicit political vision, and the way it reads like patriarchy on steroids: technological power, military power, national power and a particular conception of masculine authority all wrapped into one rather intimidating package. Palantir’s 2026 summary of the manifesto explicitly calls for a closer relationship between Silicon Valley and American national power.

It also explicitly lists the great AI job displacement as a political win because AI will increasingly replace the jobs of liberal women who tend to vote Democrat. I’m serious, Palantir’s CEO explicitly called this a win.