In light of the capitol riots—and an increase in things like hate speech and vaccine conspiracies in the days leading up to them—Facebook will be holding Facebook Groups accountable in the days to come.
Facebook users have always had some degree of moderation, but much of that accountability has been contingent on others reporting errant behavior, often necessitating multiple reports across the board before resulting in some kind of action from the social media platform. This new initiative will put the magnifying glass over groups in general, making it harder for them to contain or endorse content that violates Facebook’s terms of use.
Penalties for breaking those terms will vary, but may include anything from restrictions to immediate removal from the platform depending on how “egregious” the offense is. Repeat offenders will eventually be removed.
Those restrictions aren’t exactly opaque, either. Facebook’s VP of engineering, Tom Alison, made the platform’s new priorities clear in a recent blog post: “Groups and members that violate our rules should have reduced privileges and reach, with restrictions getting more severe as they accrue more violations, until we remove them completely.”
This isn’t the first time that Facebook has addresses issues with their Groups system. They stopped recommending political groups to users outside of those communities back in November—something they said would not change after the election—and their push to show people who aren’t in Groups content from ones that might be interesting to them seems to be slowing.
In fact, those recommendations will be a factor in taking away power from Groups who break the guidelines. Offending Groups won’t necessarily show up in people’s recommendations—or they will show up far lower than other Groups—thus decreasing the number of people who can access them.
Facebook’s motive here is pretty clear. The social media platform has been criticized heavily in the past for everything from being lenient on hate speech to influencing political outcomes, and while it’s easy to deliberate the validity of some of those claims, it’s much harder to ignore the fact that the amount of harmful content on Facebook is debilitating—something against which they seem to be taking a firm stance with this new directive.
Jack Lloyd has a BA in Creative Writing from Forest Grove's Pacific University; he spends his writing days using his degree to pursue semicolons, freelance writing and editing, oxford commas, and enough coffee to kill a bear. His infatuation with rain is matched only by his dry sense of humor.
