Facebook, the social media giant still caught in the midst of a data breach scandal, announced today that it will conduct a series of public events across several countries, including India as an initiative to improve and refine its community standard guidelines.
The social media company announced that it was revising its internal enforcement guidelines to its users on Tuesday and the major innovation is that users can now challenge decisions of the company to remove photos, videos or posts it believes to violate community standards.
“We decided to publish these internal guidelines for two reasons. First, the guidelines will help people understand where we draw the line on nuanced issues. Second, providing these details makes it easier for everyone, including experts in different fields, to give us feedback so that we can improve the guidelines and the decisions we make over time,” Facebook Vice President Global Policy Management Monika Bickert wrote in a blogpost.
The post also informed users that Facebook is giving its users the “right to appeal our decisions on individual posts so you can ask for a second opinion when you think we’ve made a mistake.”
The community standards guidelines of Facebook were based on feedback received by users over time, while also being driven by social norms and language. However, Facebook laid emphasis on the fact that the principles of safety, voice and equity on which the standards are based remained intact.
“In May, we will launch Facebook Forums: Community Standards, a series of public events in Germany, France, the UK, India, Singapore, the US and other countries where we’ll get people feedback directly. We will share more details about these initiatives as we finalize them,” the post added.
The community standards are maintained through a combination of artificial intelligence and reports from users, which determine whether some posts, pictures or videos are inappropriate. A Community Operations team that work 24/7 in over 40 languages then reviews the reports. The Community Operations team currently consists of over 7,500 employees, a 40% increase from last year.
“We know we need to do more. That’s why, over the coming year we are going to build out the ability for people to appeal our decisions. As a first step, we are launching appeals for posts that were removed for nudity/sexual activity, hate speech or graphic violence,” it said.
Therefore, users will now have the authority to request additional review on posts removed by the platform. An employee will then review the posts again within a time frame of 24 hours. If the removal was done by mistake, the user will be notified promptly and the post will be available again.
Instagram Policy Update
Instagram, the photo and video social sharing platform owned by Facebook Inc. also updated some of its terms and data policy.
Instagram has updated its intellectual property licenses, however, the ownership of content posted by users, such as photographs are still owned by those posting it. Additionally, the platform updated the way it uses the information to show activity on Instagram, meaning that people can now see how a user interacted with an ad in the same fashion as they would do on a regular post.
The changes in data policy now explain how the data collected from users is shared and used in the Facebook Products, which includes Instagram.
Instagram will now collect data from stories, direct messaging, activity status and creative tools from cameras.
The new data policy also explains how the firm receives different kinds of information from a device, for example, how a user tap and scrolls on his device, which according to the company, helps them distinguish humans from robots and therefore detect fraud.
It further explains that information collected can be used for research, such as to help keep the user community of Instagram safe; like understand and prevent bullying or harassment.
The policy also shares information about what the company collects from a user’s activity and how this information is used to personalize the content experience, including ads. The policy specifies that the ads appear without sharing the user’s identity to the advertisers.