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On Sunday March 16, the famous social media site Facebook explained the new content rules, including matters of “revenge porn” and violence. The site decided to forbid certain material, including posts that show nudity or encourage the activity of various militant groups.
The “community standards” were released together with examples that clearly show what is and isn’t allowed on the 1.39 billion-member social media site. From now on, Facebook will ban direct threats, hate speech and illegal activities.
Facebook had already banned various profiles belonging to terrorist organizations but from now on it will also remove posts that encourage the activity of such groups or applaud their leaders.
Facebook also announced that photos “shared in revenge or without permission”, images that are often categorized as “revenge porn” are forbidden. However, images of women who breastfeed, scars resulted after mastectomies or images of paintings and sculptures portraying nude characters are allowed.
This new regulation is an attempt to control an environment where one can harass or bully other users as easy as one can post sport videos or news articles. Mark Zuckerberg, the Chief Executive of Facebook explained that policies and standards haven’t actually been modified. This change was more about providing additional guidance.
Through one of his posts he announced that:
“People rightfully want to know what content we will take down, what controversial content we’ll leave up, and why.”
Facebook has been dealing with controversies such as images of graphic violence and nudity for some time now.
In 2013, Facebook announced its plan of expanding the set of criteria that determine whether a horrific video should be removed or permitted on the site. The decision came after a video of a masked man beheading a woman in Mexico had been posted, sparkling the public’s disgust. The social network has also been criticized for not banning pages that encourage violence against women.
The social networking site also announced a small increase in the second half of 2014 in the number of governmental requests regarding user account data. There were 35,501 government requests in the second half in comparison to the 34,946 requests sent during the first half of 2014. User data requests were sent more frequently from countries such as India whereas the United Stated and Germany had a lower number of requests.
Image Source: Salon
