Facebook recently announced new steps to discourage the dissemination of offensive material such as hate speech and disinformation in its interest-based fora named Groups. The actions follow the social networking site, which received critical backlash that its organizations were linked to demonstrations that lead to the Capitol riot in America earlier this year.
Tom Alison, Facebook Vice President of Engineering, wrote on Wednesday in a blog post: “We realize that we have a larger obligation as we amplify and recommend content.” In the coming months, these latest updates will take place worldwide, Facebook added. When a party begins to break the laws, the social networking giant claimed to show them less in recommendations, and users will thus be less likely to find them.
This is related to the approach in News Feed, in which less quality content can be seen on the website since fewer users are seeing them. “With prohibitions becoming stronger and more breaches occur, organizations and members who abuse Our Laws may have limited rights and scope until we eliminate them entirely,” Alison said.
“And if needed, we will exclude groups and individuals without these intermediate measures in cases of serious damage.” Facebook said it would begin to remind users before they can join a group that has infringements on “Community standards,” so that before joining the group they will take an educated choice.
“We’re going to restrict these groups’ invitation notifications because people are less likely to participate,” said Alison. The website would reduce the spread of the content of the current users to lower in the News Feed.
“We believe these steps in their entirety would make finding and participate in communities that violate our laws tougher along with demotion groups in guidelines,” said Alison. Facebook has said that it is going to require that administrators and moderators accept all content temporarily if this group has a large number of users who have breached our policy or are part of other communities that have been deleted because we have broken our laws.
This indicates that the contents of the broader community are only seen and accepted by an administrator or moderator. If an administrator or moderator regularly accepts contents that contradict his rules, the community is taken down by Facebook.
“We will block anyone from being allowed to post or comment for a certain time in either group if anyone has repeated breaches in groups,” said Alison. “There would therefore be no possibility of inviting anyone to some groups and of creating new groups.”
About Facebook:
Facebook is a forum where you can link to friends, peers, or people who do not meet, who register for free profiles online. It enables users to communicate their own views and ideas with as many people as they want to with images, songs, videos, and blogs.