Five years ago, George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer after Floyd was suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill. His death ignited a series of protests in the United States that gave new energy to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and which seemed—at the time—to reshape society, online and offline.
As the protests that were born out of Floyd’s death reached their zenith in June 2020, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a poignant message: “To members of our Black community: I stand with you. Your lives matter. Black lives matter.” Zuckerberg also pledged that Meta would revise its content policies to tamp down on hate speech. At the same time, platforms like Twitter—now X—took the unprecedented step of limiting the reach of posts by then-sitting U.S. president Donald Trump, after he warned protestors in Minneapolis responding to Floyd’s death that “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Reddit updated its hate speech policy; TikTok had to apologize that its algorithm inadvertently suppressed BLM content.
Five years on from Floyd’s death, a lot has changed, including social media’s tolerance for hate speech, incitement to violence, and racism. “Given the rollback of a lot of DEI friendly policies, I’d say we can tell how performative those approaches were,” says Carolina Are, a researcher at the Center for Digital Citizens at Northumbria University. “Platforms are private companies, not public institutions despite their overshare of online civil space, so they will always seek to protect their bottom line,” says tèmítópé lasade-anderson, executive director at Glitch, a charity focused on digital rights.
The end of DEI
Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of that backsliding was Meta terminating its major diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs for hiring, training and picking suppliers in response to a “changing” approach to DEI within the United States. That change happened in January, as soon as Donald Trump took office as president. The ease with which those programs were rolled back hints at how firmly the statements made immediately after Floyd’s death were held within tech organizations.
“Companies of all stripes are conspicuously scaling back DEI programs for employees, and platforms are no exception,” says Daphne Keller., director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. Keller says that change isn’t just trying to reflect the political winds. “The Trump administration has made it clear that companies risk having multi-million dollar mergers blocked or government contracts terminated if they do not eliminate efforts to diversify hiring, training, and promotion,” she says. It’s in that light—tech companies being threatened with losing out on cash—that the decisions are being made, Keller reckons. Meta did not respond to a request to comment for this story.
The “free speech” platform
In Elon Musk’s case, after he took over X, the company adopt new policies to allow more leeway for, Musk claimed, people to say things that could be offensive, but not illegal, while simultaneously. cracking down on the ability to say other words, such as cisgender. Hate speech and racist tweets rose by nearly half in the period after Elon Musk took over Twitter, according to a February 2025 study by researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Neither Musk nor X’s press office responded to a request for this story.
“In general I’d say platforms have been aligning with anti-DEI initiatives, showing that their pro-BLM stances were entirely performative,” says Are. Whether that’s totally fair is uncertain. Roy Austin, a civil rights attorney of three decades standing who was hired as vice president for civil rights at Meta around six months after Floyd’s death, left the company in March 2025. His parting message was largely positive about his time at the company, while acknowledging “the complexity and challenges of our work.” (Austin declined to speak for this story.)
Meta’s January winding back of its policies was roundly criticized by some of the same civil rights organizations who the social network had often called on to advise Meta on its decision-making. The platform had shown a “cynical disregard” for the diversity of its user base, the letter, organized by the nonprofit Common Cause, read. Yet Meta’s latest transparency report shows that hate speech has dropped on Facebook, from the average user encountering around 10 posts containing it for every 10,000 they saw, to around two today.
That data stops, however, before the big change in January took place. What it looks like five years on from BLM protestors chanting “No justice, no peace” on streets around the United States will have to wait for the company’s next transparency report.
