Facebook sets clear guidelines on acceptable behavior

The company has been in hot water in the past over censorship, so its setting the record straight

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Facebook has often found itself in a pretty uncomfortable position: trying to be a place of open expression, while also setting some groundrules over what its user can, and cannot post.

Frankly, the network has not always shown the best judgment in trying to decide what to allow, and not allow. Facebook has gotten itself into trouble before, over videos and pictures of mother's breastfeeding, as well as women showing their mastectomy scars. The company also allowed a video of a woman being beheaded to make the rounds, before reversing that decision. 

These kinds of incidents have had the effect of not only potentially alienating users, but of confusing them as well. So Facebook had decided to clarify what, exactly, is and is not acceptable on its network.

"Every day, people around the world use Facebook to connect with family and friends, share information and express themselves. The conversations that happen here mirror the diversity of the more than one billion people who use Facebook, with people discussing everything from pets to politics," Facebook wrote in a blog post on Sunday.

"Our goal is to give people a place to share and connect freely and openly, in a safe and secure environment."

To be clear, Facebook is not updating its policies and standards, it is simple making them easier to understand.

heard from people that it would be helpful to provide more clarity and examples, so we are doing so with today’s update.

The updated Community Standards are now broken into four sections:

• Helping to keep you safe
• Encouraging respectful behavior
• Keeping your account and personal information secure
• Protecting your intellectual property

So, for example, self-injury, which falls under the "helping to keep you safe" monkier now explains in better detail what exactly Facebook means: it prohibits content that promotes or encourages suicide or any other type of self-injury, including self-mutilation and eating disorders. It do not, however, consider body modification to be self-injury. 

Nudity, which comes under "encouraging respectful behavior," addresses some of the blowback that Facebook had previously received.

"We remove photographs of people displaying genitals or focusing in on fully exposed buttocks. We also restrict some images of female breasts if they include the nipple, but we always allow photos of women actively engaged in breastfeeding or showing breasts with post-mastectomy scarring," it writes. 

The hardest section to regulate, Facebook said in the post, is hate speech.

"We understand that many countries have concerns about hate speech in their communities, so we regularly talk to governments, community members, academics and other experts from around the globe to ensure that we are in the best position possible to recognize and remove such speech from our community," it said. "We know that our policies won’t perfectly address every piece of content, especially where we have limited context, but we evaluate reported content seriously and do our best to get it right."

Overall, the company points out that what one person might be offended by might be a joke to someone else, and may not violate any of its standards.

I have to give Facebook a lot of credit for doing this; it is actively engaging with its users, addressing their concerns, and explaining the tightrope it has to walk. Considering how quickly everyone on social media is to get overly offended by every tiny perceived slight, its best to be 100% clear on what acceptable behavior actually looks like.

(Image source: blog.themonsta.id.au)