How stakeholder engagement helps us develop the Facebook Community Standards

UPDATED

JAN 18, 2023

Gathering input from stakeholders is an important part of how Meta develops its content policies, including Facebook’s Community Standards and Instagram’s Community Guidelines. We want our policies to be based on feedback from both community representatives and a broad spectrum of the people who use our services, and we want to learn from and incorporate the advice of experts.

Stakeholder engagement can make our policies more nuanced and better attuned to local context. It introduces us to new perspectives, allows us to share our thinking on policy options, and roots our policies in sources of knowledge and experience beyond Meta.

The Content Policy Stakeholder Engagement team is responsible for conducting engagement across all of Meta’s content policies. Whenever the Content Policy team revises the Community Standards, we develop and implement an outreach strategy for connecting with global stakeholders who are most affected by the policy change, and who have relevant expertise and lived experience. We post a summary of this engagement alongside the revised policy language in our Transparency Center.

Our outreach also covers issues of misinformation: we engage extensively with experts and civil society stakeholders on topics such as state media, harmful health misinformation, and misinformation that may contribute to a risk of offline harm. Our team regularly speaks with academics and NGOs to provide visibility into how we develop and apply our policies in these areas.

Creating an inclusive stakeholder base has always been a core principle for us. This goal means seeking feedback on a global basis through team members with relevant expertise, background, and language skills. In our engagement, we apply a detailed inclusivity framework that seeks to integrate three core values: diversity, equity, and accessibility. We focus on reaching out to stakeholders whose voices have not been sufficiently heard in our policy dialogues – including indigenous peoples, religious minorities, the LGBTQI+ community, and people living with disabilities.