One of Facebook’s main sources of fake news and other inauthentic activity are pages operated by unscrupulous or simply careless operators that post poor quality content. Sometimes the entire page is full of questionable content and sometimes a co-manager of a page posts something fishy without the consent of other page managers.
To that end, Facebook is initiating two reforms. First, it will provide page operators with a dashboard to help them understand why they may have removed content that violates their community standards. The information that will be visible to the managers includes content that was recently removed for violating a subset of Facebook’s Community Standards as well as content recently rated “False,” “Mixture” or “False Headline” by third-party fact-checkers. In some cases, that might be all that’s needed to get a page into compliance. In other cases, the only thing that might work is to take the page down.
Ending recidivism
But that brings up the second reform. Policing pages is a bit of a game of whack-a-mole for Facebook because as soon as they remove a page for gross violations of its content policies, the operators often reemerge with a new page. So, Facebook is updating its “recidivism policy.” In a blog post, the company said, “when we remove a Page or group for violating our policies, we may now also remove other Pages and Groups even if that specific Page or Group has not met the threshold to be unpublished on its own.” In other words, they will look for networks of bad pages and remove other pages run by the same managers.
