Facebook admits that reports have highlighted gaps
Facebook admits that recent reports have ”highlighted gaps in our enforcements and demotions” saying it has taken immediate steps to address it. The company also in a blog post said it is adding the prevalence of bullying and harassment to its Community Standards Enforcement Report for the first time.
“Learnings from our first WVCR (Widely Viewed Content Report) have led to better applications and development of existing policies, including the removal of a network of more than a hundred Pages, profiles and domains for inauthentic behaviour.”
CLICKBAIT
Without mentioning accusation from whistleblower that the company does not remove aggressive content from users’ feeds because it has been proved to drive traffic, Facebook said it “use News Feed ranking to reduce the distribution of posts that may contain content people find objectionable, but don’t necessarily meet the bar of removal under our policies”.
“In creating these reports, we learned that our efforts to reduce engagement bait and low quality content needed to be refined to address more of it, which has led to changes in how we identify and reduce it.”
LOW-QUALITY CONTENT
“For example, we’re expanding our engagement bait identifiers, evaluating the impact that comments from friends can have on showing unconnected posts in News Feed, and experimenting with reducing that impact.”
“We’re also exploring new experiments to reduce posts with unrelated links. We anticipate that these changes may lead to a reduction of low-quality content in future reports; however, it may take several reporting cycles for our reduction efforts to make a noticeable impact.”
The company says it has recently updated the policies to increase enforcement against harmful content and behaviour for both private individuals and public figures.
“These updates came after years of consultation with free speech advocates, human rights experts, women’s safety groups, cartoonists and satirists, female politicians and journalists, representatives of the LGBTQ+ community, content creators and other types of public figures.”
GOVERNMENT REQUESTS
In a transparency report, the company says that during the first six months of 2021, government requests for Meta user data has increased 10.5% from 191,013 to 211,055. Of the total volume, the US continues to submit the largest number of requests, followed by India, Germany, France, Brazil and the UK.
US requests increased 4% compared to the second half of 2020. Non-disclosure orders prohibiting Meta from notifying the user that the authorities have requested their information increased to 70% in the first half of 2021 from 69% in the previous half.
“When content is reported as violating local law, but doesn’t go against our Community Standards, we may limit access to that content in the country where the local violation is alleged. During this reporting period, the volume of content restrictions based on local law increased globally 11% from 42,606 in second half of 2020 to 47,365 in first half of 2021, driven mainly by increases in requests from Mexico, Argentina, Germany, Italy, Taiwan and Pakistan.”
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