Facebook reveals secret guidelines used to police extremist content

Facebook has published the secretive rules its 7,500 content monitors use to remove posts likely to promote terrorism, incite violence or breach company policies covering everything from hate speech to child exploitation, sex, bullying and drugs.

The 27-page Facebook rulebook released yesterday offers an unprecedented insight into how the company decides what its two billion users may or may not share, and how the social media giant navigates the line between censorship and free speech. The rules update the short “community standards” guidelines Facebook has previously allowed users to see.

“You should, when you come to Facebook, understand where we draw these lines and what is OK and what’s not OK,” Facebook’s vice president of product policy and counter-terrorism, Monika Bickert, a former US federal prosecutor, said yesterday.

In Facebook’s Graphic Violence guidelines section, for example, Facebook explains that it removes content that “glorifies violence or celebrates the suffering or humiliation of others” but allows graphic content, with some limitations, to help people raise awareness about issues.

In its Hate Speech section, Facebook said it does not allow speech that “creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion and in some cases may promote real-world violence”.

The rule book does not address controversial issues that have dogged Facebook for months, however, including the publication of fake news, the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal, or questions about whether Facebook is doing enough to protect the welfare of children online.

On Monday, Facebook took another hit when it was sued for defamation by Martin Lewis, a British financial expert who claims his image has been used in 50 fake Facebook adverts to scam millions from vulnerable people.

Siobhan Cummiskey, Facebook’s head of policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, admitted the company’s enforcement of policy breaches was not perfect but insisted Facebook had the interests of its users at heart and plans to hire additional content reviewers to beef up its 7,500-strong team worldwide.

In an interview with Sky News, Ms Cummiskey said the company uses a combination of technology, human reviewers and the flagging of problem content to remove texts, pictures and video posts that

breach the site’s standards. She said that Facebook considers the safety of its users to be paramount “and that’s really why we are publishing this new set of community standards”.

Facebook said told reporters that it considers changes to its content policy every two weeks at a meeting called the Content Standards Forum, led by Ms Bickert.

Its standards are based, in part, on feedback from more than 100 organisations and experts in counter-terrorism, counter child exploitation and other areas.

Facebook said it would also introduce a mechanism that will allow users to appeal against decisions to take down content. Previously, users could appeal only against the removal of accounts, groups and pages.

The new standards highlight Facebook’s determination to act on unacceptable content, but they are also an admission by Facebook that it needs to improve.

“Our policies are only as good as the strength and accuracy of our enforcement and our enforcement isn’t perfect. We make mistakes because our processes involve people and people are not infallible,” Ms Bickert wrote in a blog post.