Community Standards
Policies that outline what is and isn't allowed on our apps.
Meta Advertising Standards
Policies for ad content and business assets.
Other policies
Other policies that apply to Meta technologies.
How Meta improves
How we update our policies, measure results, work with others, and more.
Age-Appropriate Content
Explore how we help teens have safe, positive experiences on Facebook and Instagram.
Our Approach To Dangerous Organizations and Individuals
How we approach dangerous organizations and individuals.
Our approach to the opioid epidemic
How we support communities in the face of the opioid epidemic.
Our approach to elections
How we help prevent interference, empower people to vote and more.
Our approach to misinformation
How we work with independent fact-checkers, and more, to identify and take action on misinformation.
Our approach to newsworthy content
How we assess content for newsworthiness.
Our approach to Facebook Feed ranking
How we reduce problematic content in News Feed.
Our approach to explaining ranking
How we build AI systems.
Content Library and Content Library API
Comprehensive access to public data from Facebook and Instagram
Ad Library tools
Comprehensive and searchable database of all ads currently running across Meta technologies
Other research tools and datasets
Additional tools for in-depth research on Meta technologies and programs
Community Standards Enforcement Report
Quarterly report on how well we're doing at enforcing our policies on the Facebook app and Instagram.
Intellectual Property
Report on how well we're helping people protect their intellectual property.
Government Requests for User Data
Report on government request for people's data.
Content Restrictions Based on Local Law
Report on when we restrict content that's reported to us as violating local law.
Internet Disruptions
Report on intentional internet restrictions that limit people's ability to access the internet.
Widely Viewed Content Report
Quarterly report on what people see on Facebook, including the content that receives the widest distribution during the quarter.
Regulatory and Other Transparency Reports
Download current and past regulatory reports for Facebook and Instagram.
Oversight Board Selects Case About a Post in a Group Discussing the Situation in South Africa While Using Slurs
UPDATED
JUN 12, 2023
2021-011-FB-UA
Today, the Oversight Board selected a case appealed by a Facebook user regarding a post in a public group that discusses “multi-racialism” in South Africa, arguing that poverty, homelessness, and landlessness have increased for black people in South Africa since 1994, with white people still holding and controlling the majority of wealth. The post includes a number of slurs.
Facebook took down this content for violating our policy on hate speech , as laid out in the Facebook Community Standards . We do not allow content that “describes or negatively targets people with slurs, where slurs are defined as words that are inherently offensive and used as insulting labels” on the basis of protected characteristics including race or ethnicity.
We will implement the board’s decision once it has finished deliberating, and we will update this post accordingly. Please see the board’s website for the decision when they issue it.
Case decision
We welcome the Oversight Board’s decision today on this case. The board decided to uphold Meta’s decision so we have taken no further action related to this case or the content.
After conducting a review of the recommendation provided by the board in addition to their decision, we will update this post.
Recommendations
On October 27, 2021, Meta responded to the board’s recommendation for this case. We are implementing their recommendation in part.
Recommendation 1 (implementing in part)Notify users of the specific rule within the Hate Speech Community Standard that has been violated in the language in which they use Facebook, as recommended in case decision 2020-003-FB-UA (Armenians in Azerbaijan) and case decision 2021-002-FB-UA (Depiction of Zwarte Piet). The Board looks forward to Meta providing information that confirms implementation for English-language users and information about the timeframe for implementation for other language users.
Our commitment: In line with our continued work resulting from the board recommendation 2020-003-FB-UA-1 in the Armenians in Azerbaijan case, we are building new capabilities to provide more detailed notifications to users who violate the Hate Speech Community Standard. As we’ve previously described, people using Facebook in English now receive more specific messaging when they violate our hate speech policy. We have begun testing versions of this messaging on Facebook in Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese, and are working to expand to Instagram as well.
Considerations: Improving the effectiveness of our user-level messaging is one of the central goals of our integrity efforts. As we described in our Q1 2021 Quarterly Update on the Oversight Board, people using Facebook in English now receive more specific messaging when they violate our hate speech policy, and we provided that specific messaging in this case. The notification explained that we don’t allow content on our platform that contains hate speech, which includes attacks on people because of their race, ethnicity, religion, caste, physical or mental ability, gender, or sexual orientation. We provided two specific examples of prohibited content: using slurs or other offensive words to insult specific groups and using language that is hateful towards specific groups.
We have begun testing more specific messaging for hate speech violations on Facebook in other languages, beginning with Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese. We are also testing these notifications on Instagram in English, Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese, and we expect to have results by the end of this year.
Next steps:We will track progress on this recommendation under our continued work following board recommendation 2020-003-FB-UA-1, in the Armenians in Azerbaijan case. We expect to provide a progress update in our first Quarterly Update of 2022.
