With an outcry of transparency being demanded all over the globe, Meta, the parent company of Facebook has plans to update the old ways as Meta announces new ‘Facebook Penalty’ and ‘Facebook Jail’ reforms. This is in line with the Oversight Board continued push to make sure that Facebook penalty system is more proportionate. The idea behind the decision is its effort to keep the app safe while also allowing people to have their feelings said aloud.
Facebook Jail has been for quite some time been synonymous with a system that a user violating Facebook policies has to experience. But the issue as sufficed by the same blog states “The vast majority of people on our apps are well-intentioned. Historically, some of those people have ended up in “Facebook jail” without understanding what they did wrong or whether they were impacted by a content enforcement mistake.”
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The intention behind the change of these policies is that with its new system, the company would try to make people understand what they did wrong which led to the removal of their content. This system has been shown to reduce the amount of re-offense instead of restricting their ability to post content on the platform. But the company will still be strict with regular violators as the blog states that the company will still apply these restrictions to repetitive offenders and violators that will usually begin at the seventh violation. This will also come with sufficient warnings to make the user get an idea of why the content was removed.
But the company is still clear about violations that will result in immediate account removal which include, “terrorism, child exploitation, human trafficking, suicide promotion, sexual exploitation, the sale of non-medical drugs or the promotion of dangerous individuals and organizations”.
Meta-analysis has found that nearly 80% of its platform users that have a low number of policy violations strike do not violate them in the next 60 days period. Therefore, it gets clear that a large proportion of Facebook users do respond well to warnings as they want to avoid any policy violations in the future.
As the old system had more stringent responses to the policy violations, it also created some issues making it hard for the company to do the analysis on the user if he really has bad intentions or not. Earlier the system had penalties that could go as long as a 30-day period which stripped him of the freedom to create content. This made it quite hard for the user to correct his mistake or give any explanation for the said content. In the new system, this time period will be lowered to less time, providing the company time to spot violation trends and come up with stricter actions to remove the violators completely.
The blog also stated some examples of how the system might take some of the statements as violations which actually are just some random jokes between friends. This includes, “I’m on my way to kidnap you,” which might be just a funny statement from a friend coming to pick you up. These statements could violate its violence and incitement policy leading to a block or stricter action. Another one is posting address or other confidential information, which actually be an address to a spot you are meeting your friends at. This post might appear to be sharing personally identifiable information in violation of its policies.
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The action was applauded by the Oversight Board in a blog post titled, Oversight Board response to Meta’s announcement on reforming its penalty system which stated, “This is a welcome step in the right direction for Meta, and the Board will continue to push for further improvements to Meta’s content moderation policies and practices.”
As Meta announces new ‘Facebook Penalty’ and ‘Facebook Jail’ reforms, this seems to be an important step in making the social media platforms more transparent as well as fair.
Source: Meta Newsroom
