A Short Summary of Facebook’s Mid-April Community Standards Update
Working hard to overcome recent inquiry into the availability & promotion of obscene content in the wake of New Zealand’s Christchurch shooting, the tech giant has emboldened its existing Community Standards model to further reduce & remove the spread of objectionable content across its services.
The social giant announced last week the introduction of multiple updates aimed towards promoting credible, accurate news sources & penalising objectionable content. Facebook tells us that these changes will affect groups & pages in a fairly profound way, coupled with (among the various changes) the introduction of a brand-new content metric: Click-Gap.
🔵 Click-Gap
Click-Gap was launched globally on April 10 of 2019. In plain English, the metric attempts to identify content linked to websites that are disproportionately popular on Facebook compared to the rest of the web. In other words, the metric aims to identify pieces of shared content linking to websites that appear to be ‘going viral’ on Facebook yet remain largely unknown outside of the social network. Presumably, this content will then be further scrutinised to determine whether or not it’s reach will be limited.
This could be bad news for fringe news sites – those seeking to profit off the back of heavy Facebook traffic via intentionally controversial news articles. Unusual popularity of a site can be a sign that the domain is intentionally releasing low-quality ‘viral’ content, or unduly profiting from a presence in Facebook’s News Feed in a way that doesn’t reflect the overall authority of the site itself.
The service was launched globally earlier this month (April 2019). If you’ve noticed any strange or new analytics on your posts since then, we’d love to hear.
🔵 Groups
For groups, Facebook is ramping up the importance & accountability of group admins in the maintenance of their groups. From the many changes being introduced, we’ve summarised the important ones below (feel free to read the full changelog here).
- Facebook will limit the News Feed reach of groups that are found to repeatedly share content rated false by independent fact-checkers.
Together with Click-Gap launched April 10, globally. - Facebook will hold group admins more accountable for Community Standards violations. Admin and moderator content violations, including member posts they have approved, will be used as a stronger signal that the group violates Facebook’s standards and lead to “a proportionately higher chance that the group will be taken down”. This is typical Facebook lawyer speak – basically, group admins need to be more careful that their group members’ posts conform with community standards, else run a higher risk of having their page completely shut down.
Being rolled out by country over the coming weeks, globally. - Finally, group members will be able to remove their posts and comments from a group after they leave the group. This only really carries weight if a single member has contributed a great deal of valued content to a group – if they deactivate their account or have it blocked by Facebook (i.e. for a breach of the ever-expanding community standards outlined above), their content may disappear.
These changes will be rolled out later this month (April 2019), and we’ll be sure to test them once they hit Australia.
Note: For most business groups (and group owners), these two changes above shouldn’t affect you at all. We’d imagine the groups to be affected are suburb, buy & sell and politically-aligned groups, where emotive and, well, spammy content is usually shared.
With this said, a whisper’s flying around that Facebook is lowering the reach of group posts across the board – especially if your group is linked to your page (i.e. a lot of business groups). We’ve spoken with several page-running business owners and we’re unable to confirm this, however it could still hold merit. At least for now, our advice is to not unlink your groups from your page and continue staffing & vetting your groups as you usually would (though perhaps being that little bit more vigilant in reviewing group members’ pending link posts). We’ll be sure to update you if the situation changes.
For an easy way of assessing whether Facebook approves of the content, just click that little “I” icon that appears on link posts to view the Context Button & Trust Indicator – two Facebook-provided content metrics to offer admins peace of mind.
🔵 Messenger
Facebook’s popular instant messaging service has also been tweaked. The only material change appears to be the importing of existing “Verified” badges from pages/profiles into Messenger.
- Facebook is bringing the Verified Badge from Facebook into Messenger.
This is likely to prevent nefarious individuals from posing as high-profile public figures for financial purposes, but probably won’t be particularly impactful for most small businesses (getting verified with Facebook is a nice touch, but hardly difficult. We wrote a simple guide on it here).
Rolling out this week, globally.
On par with Facebook, Instagram has already begun reducing the spread of posts that are vaguely ‘inappropriate’ but do not go against Instagram’s Community Guidelines.
- Instagram has significantly reduced the spread of inappropriate content (content that doesn’t quite breach Community Standards but is on the way there).
This is a fairly big change, and Facebook offers an interesting example of what they classify as inappropriate (hint: don’t open at work). See for yourself: jump into Instagram’s Explore screen and reflect on the suggested content displayed. Mentally compare that to what you were seeing this time a month ago, and its undeniable – you’re looking at a whole lot less scantily-clad #instababes, and a whole lot more fringe interest content related to your advertising preferences.
Don’t worry, content from your followed accounts won’t be affected and followed user’s posts will still appear in your account’s feed as normal – you just won’t receive ‘suggestions’ for similar content any longer.
This carries particular weight for swimwear, jewellery & adult industry members, who may find their ads’ reach substantially reduced outside their existing follower audience.
Already happening globally.
That’s this week in Facebook (well, partly. Google the conjecture on Facebook’s News Feed slider updates for more). For this month’s coming News Feed updates, we’ll be sure to keep you informed.