Report: Facebook's Guidelines for Removing Pages Revealed

Facebook’s guidelines for removing pages and content from the platform has been revealed.

Motherboard discovered the guidelines through leaked documents, which detailed several ways that pages and groups can be banned from the platform.

“One Facebook moderator training document for hate speech says that for Pages—Facebook’s feature for sections dedicated to, say, a band, organization, public figure, or business—the Page admin has to receive 5 ‘strikes’ within 90 days for the Page itself to be deleted,” Motherboard reported. “Alternatively, Facebook moderators are told to remove a Page if at least 30 percent of the content posted by other people within 90 days violates Facebook’s community standards. A similar 30 percent-or-over policy exists for Facebook Groups, according to the document.”

“Another hate speech document says that a profile should be taken down if there are 5 or more pieces of content from the user which indicate hate propaganda, photos of the user present with another identifiable leader, or other related violations,” they continued, adding that moderators are told to “unpublish Pages and Groups under the basis of sexual solicitation if there are over 2 ‘elements’, such as the Page description, title, photo, or pinned post, that include either explicit solicitation of nude imagery, or, if the page is more subtle, includes either a method of contact or a location.”

Facebook’s guidelines, however, can sometimes be more complex.

“The consequences for violating our Community Standards vary depending on the severity of the violation and a person’s history on the platform,” declared a Facebook spokesman in a statement. “For instance, we may warn someone for a first violation, but if they continue to violate our policies, we may restrict their ability to post on Facebook or disable their profile. We also may notify law enforcement when we believe there is a genuine risk of physical harm or a direct threat to public safety.”

Left-wing activists and news outlets, including CNN, have recently campaigned Facebook to ban InfoWars from the social network.

In an interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained why InfoWars and other pages had not been banned, declaring, “The approach that we’ve taken to false news is not to say, you can’t say something wrong on the Interne… Everyone gets things wrong, and if we were taking down people’s accounts when they got a few things wrong, then that would be a hard world for giving people a voice and saying that you care about that.”