Expanding the scope of our engagement: misinformation and transparency

UPDATED

JAN 18, 2023

When we created the Content Policy Stakeholder Engagement team, we focused on bringing external perspectives into the development of Facebook’s Community Standards, which outline what is and isn’t allowed on Facebook. Generally speaking, once we become aware of content that violates the Community Standards, we remove it.

Over time, the scope of our policies has expanded, and so has our engagement. We’ve developed additional policies to address content that is problematic but that doesn’t merit removal from our platforms. For example, if content contains sensationalized health claims, consists of spam or clickbait, or has been debunked by third-party fact-checkers, we will reduce its distribution in Feed. We built a strategy to address this type of content, and we published guidelines to govern the ranking and recommender systems that are used to distribute content on the platform. The policies we’ve engaged on include our general approach to Misinformation, our policies on harmful health and vaccine misinformation, Meta’s state media policy, the Recommendation Guidelines, the Content Distribution Guidelines, the policy for News Publishers Connected to Political Entities, and our approach to Borderline Vaccine content.

We have also conducted extensive engagement to develop Meta’s policies on misinformation surrounding Covid-19. For details, please see this academic paper published in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety.