Facebook to update its policies on handling satirical content

San Francisco, June 20

Facebook has decided to update its community standards to be more transparent about how it handles satirical content, after the independent Oversight Board asked the social network to do so.

Facebook said that it will add information to the Community Standards that makes it clear “where we consider satire as part of our assessment of context-specific decisions.

“This change will allow teams to consider satire when assessing potential Hate Speech violations,” Facebook said in a statement on Saturday.

On March 2, the Oversight Board selected a case appealed by someone on Facebook regarding a comment with a meme depicting Turkey having to choose between “The Armenian Genocide is a lie” and “The Armenians were terrorists who deserved it.” Facebook took down this content for violating its policy on hate speech, as laid out in the Community Standards.

“We welcome the Oversight Board selected a case on this case. Facebook has acted to comply with the board’s decision immediately, and this content has been reinstated,” the company said.

Facebook said that it needs to explore the benefit to the user experience that could come from informing users of multiple violations and multiple appeal opportunities resulting from a single piece of content.

“We plan to complete our assessment and update on our progress by the end of the year,” it added.

Earlier this month, Facebook said it would end its so-called “newsworthiness” policy, which allowed politicians to bypass several content rules.

“We grant our newsworthiness allowance to a small number of posts on our platform. Moving forward, we will begin publishing the rare instances when we apply it. Finally, when we assess content for newsworthiness, we will not treat content posted by politicians any differently from content posted by anyone else,” Facebook had said.

“Instead, we will simply apply our newsworthiness balancing test in the same way to all content, measuring whether the public interest value of the content outweighs the potential risk of harm by leaving it up”.

–IANS