It’s about to be Pride season, the time of year when brands cash in on “diversity” and emblazon a bunch of crap with the rainbow flag.

Every once in a while, however, a brand does something that actually moves the LGBTQ community forward. Take the latest ad from Gillette, which was posted on Thursday and which features a young trans teen from Canada by the name of Samson Bonkeabantu Brown, shaving for the first time.

Try to watch this without tearing up.

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The ad is effective not only because of its writing, which ignores clichés, but because the producers actually cast a trans person to play a trans role. Here’s how Brown described the experience in a public Facebook post.

I shot this ad for Gillette and wanted to include my father, who has been one of my greatest supporters throughout my transition, encouraging me to be confident and live authentically as my best self.

With the help of Gillette, I was able to share an important milestone in every man’s life with my father.

This moment overwhelmed me during filming and again today seeing the ad since it’s been launched. I’m keenly aware of how blessed I am to be able to exist in this world being supported by my family in ways that all too often many of my trans brother, sisters, and siblings who exist outside the binary are not always as fortunate.

I am confident that this ad will encourage many of my trans siblings and fill them with the knowledge that our existence in this world can be filled with the love and support we deserve.

Be good to yourselves. Love yourselves. And know that when you greet the world with love, it can and will love you back, often in the places you least expect.

I love you greatly.

#MyBestSelf

Gillette’s ad is part of a larger marketing campaign addressing the various faces of masculinity. Earlier in 2019, the company released an ad addressing toxic masculinity that actually polled well with viewers.

Sometimes — extremely rarely — brands get it right.

The Trump administration has banned seven words from the Centers for Disease Control’s upcoming budget documents, the Washington Post reports. The words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

CDC analysts were not given a reason for the banned words, they were simply informed of the new policy. Some phrases can be replaced or retooled, like by saying “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes” – an actual alternate phrase offered to CDC analysts in the first briefing about these words.

But not all the words are as easy to work around. It’s no secret that the current administration is anti-abortion and pushing back significantly in the fight for trans rights. Banning these words from CDC documentation directly affects communication around HIV/AIDS and the Zika virus, among others. 

This isn’t the first attempt to curb the use of language that threatens the Trump administration’s regressive policies. In March, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) removed questions about sexual orientation and gender identity from two surveys of elderly people. The department also archived a webpage containing resources for LGBTQ+ people and their families.

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On a more fundamental level, this aligns directly with the Trump administration’s mistrust of words and facts, and its tendency to dismiss whichever words and facts conflict with the administration’s views and messaging. The inclusion of “diversity,” “entitlement,” and “vulnerable” in the new list reflects this directly; it erases the words from relevant discourse and by extension threatens to sweep larger problems under the rug. 

Matt Lloyd, an HHS spokesperson, said that the department “will continue to use the best scientific evidence available to improve the health of all Americans. HHS also strongly encourages the use of outcome and evidence data in program evaluations and budget decisions.”

Encouraged or not, they can’t talk about it the same way now.

All the noise around the “drunk Pelosi” video has made something clear: Facebook wants to have it both ways. 

Some at the company would have us all believe that great strides have been made in the platform’s ongoing fight against misleading “fake news” content. But Facebook also won’t take the step of removing material like the doctored Pelosi clip, preferring instead to let users make their own choice about what to believe.

That’s the takeaway from comments made by Monika Bickert, Head of Global Policy Management at Facebook, in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“We think it’s important for people to make their own, informed choice about what to believe,” she said. Facebook works with independent fact-checking organizations to identify misleading content and flag it accordingly. So the company knows what’s fake. It just won’t take the step of removing such content.

That’s what happened with a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that was doctored to make it appear as if she was drunk or in some other way impaired. Fact-checkers flagged it as “false,” a designation that earns the video a captioned warning and a reduced presence in News Feeds.

The video won’t be deleted entirely because it doesn’t violate community standards. Facebook will actively remove content that incites or promotes violence, which breaks the rules. The company has also shown a willingness to ban fake accounts and to de-platform problematic figures who repeatedly violate the site’s rules.

“We think it’s important for people to make their own, informed choice about what to believe.”

In the CNN interview, Cooper asks Bickert again and again why Facebook wouldn’t just delete content that’s been flagged as false. She returns again and again to that idea of letting users decide on their own what to trust Misleading content is flagged as such, and that’s supposed to be enough.

Is it, though? There’s evidence that even flagged and downranked content can enjoy considerable reach on Facebook. Perhaps that’s because certain individuals have worked hard to promote the message that the media as a whole is an enemy that shouldn’t be trusted. People believe what they want to believe in the current climate, to the point that a “misleading content” tag could be read as a positive among certain readers and belief systems.

Cooper tries to address that in his chat with Bickert, pointing out that “the video is more powerful than whatever you’re putting under the video.” Bickert deflects, suggesting that the video is OK to keep around because the conversation around it has shifted to questions like the one Cooper posed.

“Well actually what we’re seeing is that the conversation on Facebook, on Twitter, offline as well, is about this video having been manipulated,” she said. “As evidenced by my appearance today, this is the conversation.”

Later in the segment, Cooper presses Bickert on Facebook’s responsibility to accuracy as a provider of news. She pushes back, pointing out that the company is a social media business, not a news business. When Cooper presses her yet again — “you’re sharing news … because you make money from it,” he argues — Bickert draws a line between rules-violating violent content and political discourse.

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“If it’s misinformation that’s related to safety, we can and we do remove it. And we work with safety groups to do that. But when we’re talking about political discourse and the misinformation around that, we think the right approach is to let people make an informed choice,” she said.

What a stunning point to make when we’re barely a month removed from the release of the almost 500-page Mueller report, roughly half of which focuses on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As we now know, a big portion of those efforts involved exploiting social media platforms like Facebook.

It is a proven fact by now that political misinformation can have harmful effects. Proven beyond the shadow of any doubt. It’s great to see Facebook taking action against the kinds of fake accounts that help to spread the bad stuff around, but it’s only a half-measure. Plenty of real people are taken in by misinformation around the internet that they then share on social media.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has leaned on policy to defend the presence of inappropriate content on the platform. But it’s an increasingly hard pill to swallow as suspicions about the negative impact of disinformation on political discourse are proven correct again and again. Maybe it’s time for Facebook to change the company line.