Facebook makes an intelligent abuse reporter

The biggest social network fine-tunes its tools for user reports of site abuse

Facebook has more than 300 million active users. Half of those users log into Facebook on any given day. Almost three-fourths of all the site's users live outside the United States.

How does a site of such density, magnitude, and variety monitor its content efficiently and comprehensively, weeding out cases of abuse?

By enlisting user support, of course!

Though the site has always had procedures in place that users can follow in order to report bullying, harassing, and other forms of abuse, Facebook announced today that it will be updating its site to fine-tune those procedures.

Something offensive in a video can now be explained by users with not only a reason for the report, but also an exact time in the video (down to the minute and second) at which point the offensive content occurs. Similarly, reports of offensive notes can include a copied-and-pasted excerpt of the precise lines of offense extracted from the whole content.

"When reporting an offensive photo, you can select from the following reasons for why it may violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities: nudity or pornography, drug use, excessive gore or violence, attacks individual or group, advertisement or spam or infringes on your intellectual property," writes Jessica Ghastin, a specialist on the Facebook user operations team. "Keep in mind that we won't remove a photo or video just because it's unflattering."

Coincidentally, Twitter also just updated its site to give users the power to report spam, a seemingly rampant form of abuse on the smaller social site. Seeing these updates more often is a really good thing, because it puts more control in the hands of users. Even though reports often have to be verified by somebody actually handling these sorts of things on the other end, user-based report systems reinforce the philosophy of Web 2.0.