Image Courtesy: business-standard.com
To display more transparency on how Facebook, the US-based multinational technology conglomerate, handles the satirical content posted on the social network has decided to update its community standards.
The decision comes after the independent Oversight Board recommended the multi-industry company to do so. Oversight Board had determined that the conglomerate was wrong to remove the comment of a user that referenced to Turkey’s government, based on a meme depicting the country having to choose between “The Armenian Genocide is a lie” and “The Armenians were terrorists who deserved it.” As laid out in the community standards, the social network had taken down the post for violating its hate speech Community Standard.
The board mentioned in its recommendation that while the company has said that it will make exceptions for satire, there is no specification on how or what qualifies as satire in its guidelines.
As per Facebook, it will be adding information to the community standard guidelines to make it clear on “where we consider satire a part of our assessment of context-specific decisions.” On June 19, it stated that the update will allow teams to consider satire when assessing potential hate speech violations. Additionally, it would “initiate a review of identical content with parallel context” and may take further action as well.
In early June, the social network had said that it would end its so-called ‘newsworthiness’ policy as it allowed politicians to ignore many content rules.
Nick Clegg of Facebook wrote in a blog post that the company would not treat content uploaded by politicians different from content posted by anyone else.