Announcements
May 19, 2021
Our Commitment to Safety and Integrity
At Facebook we know that when we safeguard a healthy and vibrant community for people on our platforms, that leads to a healthy and vibrant community for businesses. Our Community Standards and Community Guidelines define what is and isn't allowed on Facebook and Instagram, and our Community Standards and Enforcement Report tracks our progress and commitment to making Facebook and Instagram safe and inclusive.
Today we’re publishing our Community Standards Enforcement Report (CSER) for the first quarter of 2021. Some highlights of the report include:
- A decrease in the prevalence of bad content: Violent and graphic content prevalence was 0.03-0.04% on Facebook, down from 0.05% last quarter. Prevalence of Hate Speech also decreased from 0.07%-0.08% to 0.05-0.06%. These improvements in prevalence on Facebook are due to changes we made to reduce problematic content in News Feed.
- Progress on hate speech: Prevalence of hate speech on Facebook continues to decrease for the second quarter in a row. In Q1, it was 0.05-0.06%, or 5 to 6 views per 10,000 views. This improvement in prevalence on Facebook continues to stem from changes we made to reduce problematic content in News Feed. On a quarterly basis, from Q1 2018 to Q1 2021, we have increased our content actioned by 10 times. Since we have been reporting it, we have increased our proactive rate from 24% to 97%.
Read on for highlights from the report, which include topics like: Independent Oversight, COVID-19 Vaccines and Misinformation, and News Feed Controls. You can also click the button below to download a summary of the report.
Independent Oversight
We believe that no company should grade its own homework and the credibility of our systems should be earned, not assumed. Independent audits and assessments are crucial to hold us accountable and help us do better.
Here are some ways we’re staying accountable:
- We worked with international experts to provide an independent, public assessment of whether the metrics we share in the enforcement report provide accurate and useful measures of Facebook’s content moderation challenges and our work to address them.
- We’ve been working with auditors internally to assess how the metrics we report can be audited most effectively. We’ve selected EY to undertake this engagement. We hope to conduct this audit starting in 2021.
- The Oversight Board was created to help Facebook answer some of the most difficult questions around freedom of expression online: what to take down, what to leave up and why.
COVID-19 Vaccines and Misinformation
In addition to our work on political content, we’re continuing our efforts to combat misinformation tied to vaccines and the COVID-19 virus, ensuring that our policies align with expert health advice and authoritative health sources:
- We continue to remove false claims about vaccines and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 virus on Facebook and Instagram.
- We're also continuing to prohibit content that tries to exploit the pandemic for commercial gain — including ads or organic posts that promote the sale of a COVID-19 vaccine, attempts to sell COVID-19 vaccine kits or expedited access to the vaccine, or claims that the vaccine is a cure for the virus.
To learn more about how we’re supporting COVID-19 relief efforts and keeping people informed, visit our COVID-19 action page.
News Feed Controls
In March we announced a series of new controls designed to give people and businesses more direct control over their experience in News Feed. This included things like:
- Being able to control your commenting audience for a given public post by choosing from a menu of options ranging from anyone who can see the post to only the people and Pages you tag.
- Launching Favorites, a new tool where you can control and prioritize posts from the friends and Pages you care about most in News Feed.
- Providing more context around the content we suggest in News Feed by expanding “Why am I seeing this?"
To update what you want to see and how you share to your News Feed, check out your News Feed preferences and privacy settings in the app and adjust them to your liking.
Our goal is to lead the technology industry in transparency, and we’ll continue to share more enforcement metrics as part of this effort. We know there is more work to do, and we are committed to protecting our global community through transparency, accuracy and ongoing engagement with outside organizations.
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