Facebook’s secretive guidelines for deleting pages and groups that the company often referenced but never disclosed publicly leaked online, having been obtained by Motherboard. The threshold for removing Facebook pages on the basis of hate speech are five strikes being issued to administrators in a span of 90 days, with the same guideline also applying to groups and individual profiles. The actual definition of a strike is less clear as it still relies on reported posts and other content being removed by Facebook’s human reviewers. The social media giant is also instructing its moderators to delete groups and pages where 30-percent of content posted by users over a 90-day period violates the company’s community standards.
The Menlo Park, California-based company is understood to be changing its moderation policies on a frequent basis as it continues to tweak its practices meant to make Facebook a safer place for everyone based on its data-driven strategy. Due to that state of affairs, it’s presently unclear whether the guidelines outlined above are still in force. Facebook, together with Twitter and Google’s YouTube, has recently been questioned by U.S. lawmakers over its content removal practices, with a number of Republican politicians accusing it of having a liberal bias, a notion that the company strongly denied.
During a House committee hearing on Tuesday, a Facebook representative said the firm remains committed to valuing free speech and allowing its users to express themselves so long as they aren’t encouraging violent acts or other types of extreme behavior. The policy caused some controversies among the general public, especially amid the company’s fight against fake news, with Facebook being repeatedly pressured to remove conspiracy outlets from its platform but often refusing to do so. Following special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments of over two dozen Russian individuals and companies over attempts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election in the United States, Capitol Hill may end up introducing legislation to regulate digital companies more aggressively so as to protect the American democratic process.