In order to maintain a safe environment and empower free expression, we restrict or remove accounts that are harmful to the community. We have built a combination of automated and manual systems to restrict and remove accounts that are used to egregiously or persistently violate our policies across any of our products.

Because account removal is a serious action, whenever possible, we aim to give our community opportunities to learn our rules and follow our Community Standards. For example, a notification is issued each time we remove content, and in most cases we also provide people with information about the nature of the violation and any restrictions that are applied. Our enforcement actions are designed to be proportional to the severity of the violation, the history of violations on the account, and the risk or harm posed to the community. Continued violations, despite repeated warnings and restrictions, or violations that pose severe safety risks will lead to an account being disabled.

Learn more about how Meta enforces its policies and restricts accounts in the Transparency Center.

We may restrict or disable accounts, other entities (Pages, groups, events) or business assets (Business Managers, ad accounts) that:

Violate our Community Standards involving egregious harms, including those we refer to law enforcement due to the risk of imminent harm to individual or public safety
Violate our Community Standards involving any harms that warrant referral to law enforcement due to the risk of imminent harm to individual of public safety
Violate our Advertising Standards involving deceptive or dangerous business harms
Persistently violate our Community Standards by posting violating content and/or managing violating entities or business assets
Persistently violates our Advertising Standards
Activity or behavior indicative of a clear violating purpose

We may restrict or disable accounts, other entities (Pages, groups, events) or business assets (Business Managers, ad accounts) that are:

Owned by the same person or entity as an account that has been disabled
Created or repurposed to evade a previous account or entity removal, including those assessed to have common ownership and content as previously removed accounts or entities
Created to contact a user that has blocked an account
Otherwise used to evade our enforcement actions or review processes

We may restrict or disable accounts, other entities (Pages, groups, events) or business assets (Business Managers, ad accounts) that demonstrate:

Close linkage with a network of accounts or other entities that violate or evade our policies
Coordination within a network of accounts or other entities that persistently or egregiously violate our policies
Activity or behavior indicative of a clear violating purpose through a network of accounts

We may restrict or disable accounts or other entities (Pages, groups, events), or business assets (Business Managers, ad accounts) that engage in off-platform activity that can lead to harm on our platform, including those:

Owned by a convicted sex offender
Owned by a Designated Entity or run on their behalf
Prohibited from receiving our products, services or software under applicable laws

In the following scenarios, we may request additional information about an account to ascertain ownership and/or permissible activity:

Compromised accounts
Creating or using an account or other entity through automated means, such as scripting (unless the scripting activity occurs through authorized routes and does not otherwise violate our policies)
Empty accounts with prolonged dormancy

User experiences

See some examples of what enforcement looks like for people on Facebook, such as: what it looks like to report something you don’t think should be on Facebook, to be told you’ve violated our Community Standards and to see a warning screen over certain content.

Note: We’re always improving, so what you see here may be slightly outdated compared to what we currently use.

USER EXPERIENCE

Reporting

USER EXPERIENCE

Post-report communication

USER EXPERIENCE

Takedown experience

USER EXPERIENCE

Warning screens

Reporting

1 Universal entry point

We have an option to report, whether it's on a post, comment, story, message, profile or something else.

2 Get started

We help people report things that they don’t think should be on our platform.

3 Select a problem

We ask people to tell us more about what’s wrong. This helps us send the report to the right place.

4 Check your report

Make sure the details are correct before you click Submit. It’s important that the problem selected truly reflects what was posted.

5 Report submitted

After these steps, we submit the report. We also lay out what people should expect next.

6 More options

We remove things if they go against our Community Standards, but you can also Unfollow, Block or Unfriend to avoid seeing posts in future.

Post-report communication

1 Update via notifications

After we’ve reviewed the report, we’ll send the reporting user a notification.

2 More detail in the Support Inbox

We’ll share more details about our review decision in the Support Inbox. We’ll notify people that this information is there and send them a link to it.