Notifying Users Before Posting Potential Violations
UPDATED FEB 19, 2025
In 2021, the Oversight Board took on a case involving the January 2021 Protests in Russia whereby one commenter called another a "cowardly bot" over comments the other person had made insulting people attending ongoing pro-Navalny protests. Meta took down the content for violating our Bullying and Harassment policy. The Board agreed that removal was consistent with our Community Standards but stated that the standards failed to consider wider context and disproportionately restricted freedom of expression. The Board overturned Facebook’s decision and also made a number of recommendations, including notifying users when violating character claims are only a single phrase in a larger post so that users can repost without the negative claims.
What was the impact of Meta’s implementation of this recommendation?
In response to the Board's recommendations, Meta committed to explore ways of notifying users of potential violations before we take an enforcement action. We then launched a feature called “post-time friction” (PTF) whereby if we detected, with high confidence, a potential violation, we informed users that their post might violate the policy and provided them an opportunity to understand our policies, delete the post and post again without the violating content.
Over a 12-week period in 2023, PTF was shown on more than 100M pieces of content, with over 17M notifications related to Bullying and Harassment (B&H). Across all PTF notifications, users opted to delete their posts more than 20% of the time, and for Bullying and Harassment, more than 25% of the time.
Over a 12 week period in 2023, across all notification types:
