Dangerous Organizations and Individuals (DOI) Policy Update

Our Dangerous Organizations and Individuals (DOI) policy addresses some of the most serious threats to the safety of our users and our platform. We do not allow organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent or hateful mission or are engaged in violence to have a presence on Meta. To that end, we continually assess and refine the policy to make sure that we are getting it right.

This includes the way in which we categorize dangerous actors depending on their ties to offline harm and violence. We assess these entities based on their behavior both online and offline, most significantly, their ties to violence and hate. Under this policy, we designate individuals, organizations, and networks of people. In an effort to simplify these designations, and in order to ensure more effective and consistent enforcement, we have divided the designations into two tiers.

• Tier 1 focuses on entities that engage in serious offline harms including organizing or advocating for violence against civilians, repeatedly dehumanizing or advocating for harm against people based on protected characteristics, or engaging in systematic criminal operations. We remove Glorification, Support, and Representation of these Tier 1 entities, their leaders, founders or prominent members, as well as unclear references to them when the user’s intent was not clearly indicated. In addition, we do not allow content that glorifies, supports, or represents events that Meta designates as violating violent events. For example, terrorist attacks, multiple-victim violence or attempted multiple-victim violence, serial murders, or hate crimes.

• Tier 2 includes Violent Non-State Actors that engage in violence against state or military actors in an armed conflict but do not intentionally target civilians. It also includes Violence Inducing Entities that are engaged in preparing or advocating for future violence but have not necessarily engaged in violence to date. These are also entities that may repeatedly engage in violations of our Hate Speech or Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policies on or off the platform. We remove Glorification, Material Support, and Representation of these entities, their leaders, founders and prominent members.

More specifics about the policy and how we define entities and relevant terms (i.e. glorification) can be found here.

We have also recently updated our Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy to allow for more social and political discourse in certain instances including — peace agreements, elections, human rights related issues, news reporting and academic, neutral and condemning discussion — and to ensure users are not unduly penalized for sharing it. This update was prompted by discussion and feedback from internal and external stakeholders.

In addition to this change, we also redefined what kind of language is and isn’t allowed related to praise. We heard feedback that our previous definition of “Praise”, which is prohibited for dangerous organizations and individuals, was too broad, so we updated our policy in order to make it more nuanced and proportionate.

Lastly, we revamped our policy for de-designating dangerous organizations and individuals so that it covers all DOI categories and is triggered by an entity's demonstrated behavioral change. To be considered for delisting, an entity must (1) not be designated by the U.S. government as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficking Kingpin (SDNTK); Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO); or Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT); (2) no longer be involved in violence or hate; (3) not be symbolic to violence and hate or be used to incite further violence or spread hateful propaganda.

As with all our policy updates, we aim to offer a space where users can engage in insightful conversations in a safe environment. This work is not static, and we assess it constantly to reflect evolving factors and changing circumstances.