Facebook vows to stop ‘harmful content’ by punishing users who break their rules

Facebook on Wednesday announced changes to keep the Groups feature free from “harmful content” by increasing the penalties against users who break Facebook’s “Community Standards.”

Sarah Perez for TechCrunch:

Facebook this morning announced it will increase the penalties against its rule-breaking Facebook Groups and their members, alongside other changes designed to reduce the visibility of groups’ potentially harmful content. The company says it will now remove civic and political groups from its recommendations in markets outside the U.S., and will further restrict the reach of groups and members who continue to violate its rules.

In addition to health groups, users worldwide won’t be “recommended” civic or political groups when browsing Facebook. It’s important, however, to note that recommendations are only one of many ways users find Facebook Groups. Users can also find them in search, through links people post, through invites and friends’ private messages.

In addition, Facebook says groups that have gotten in trouble for violating Facebook’s rules will now be shown lower in recommendations — a sort of downranking penalty Facebook often uses to reduce the visibility of News Feed content.

The company will also increase the penalties against rule-violating groups and their individual members through a variety of other enforcement actions. For example, users who attempt to join groups that have a history of breaking Facebook’s Community Standards will be alerted to the the group’s violations through a warning message, which may cause the user to reconsider joining.

MacDailyNews Take: Would that Sheila Broflovski could come to life, animate as it were, right into America in 2021. Unfortunately, amidst the throes of endless perceived slights and transgressions — “WHAT, WHAT, WHAT!?” — she’d soon die an admittedly pleasant death, wracked by unrelenting orgasms.

Tom Alison, VP of Engineering, Facebook Blog:

It’s important to us that people can discover and engage safely with Facebook groups so that they can connect with others around shared interests and life experiences. That’s why we’ve taken action to curb the spread of harmful content, like hate speech and misinformation, and made it harder for certain groups to operate or be discovered, whether they’re Public or Private. When a group repeatedly breaks our rules, we take it down entirely.

MacDailyNews Take: You will say what Facebook (or Twitter, Apple, Google, etc.) deems acceptable or you will not be heard, capiche?

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” — George Orwell

Note to Big Tech: Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not a user manual.