Facebook Publishes its Community Standards Enforcement Report for May 2020

Facebook has today published the fifth edition of its Community Standards Enforcement Report, providing metrics on how it enforced its policies from October 2019 through March 2020 keep Facebook and Instagram safe. At the same time, the company has also announced new safety features to protect its users against online bullying.

Facebook notes that when the COVID-19 crisis emerged, it had the tools and processes in place to move quickly and was able to continue finding and removing content that violates its policies. “Today’s report shows the impact of advancements we’ve made in the technology we use to proactively find and remove violating content.”

The company is now using technology more to prioritize content for its teams to review based on factors like virality and severity among others.

Below are some of the new safety features introduced by Facebook across its platforms, including Instagram, to combat online bullying:

• Managing unwanted interactions: We’re launching a new feature to help people manage multiple unwanted interactions at once, giving the ability to delete comments in bulk, as well as block or restrict multiple accounts that post negative comments.
• Highlighting positive comments: We want to give people an easy way to amplify and encourage positive interactions. Soon, we’ll begin testing Pinned Comments to give people a way to set the tone for their account and engage with their community by pinning a select number of comments to the top of their comments thread.
• Choosing who can tag and mention you: We’ve seen that tags and mentions can be used to target or bully others, so we’re rolling out new controls that allow you to manage who can tag or mention you on Instagram. You can choose whether you want everyone, only people you follow or no one to be able to tag or mention you in a comment, caption or Story.

More information about these updates can be found at this link.