Facebook releases community standard enforcement report regarding content removal from October 2019 to March 2020.
Facebook releases Community Standards Enforcement Report, providing metrics on how well we enforced our policies from October 2019 through March 2020 regarding content removal. We’ve spent the last few years building tools, teams, and technologies to help protect elections from interference, prevent misinformation from spreading on our apps, and keep people safe from harmful content.
When the COVID-19 crisis emerged, we had the tools and processes in place to move quickly and we were able to continue finding and removing content that violates our policies. When we temporarily sent our content reviewers home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we increased our reliance on these automated systems and prioritized high-severity content for our teams to review in order to continue to keep our apps safe during this time.
This report includes data only through March 2020 so it does not reflect the full impact of the changes we made during the pandemic. We anticipate we’ll see the impact of those changes in our next report, and possibly beyond, and we will be transparent about them. For example, for the past seven weeks, we couldn’t always offer the option to appeal content decisions and account removals, so we expect the number of appeals to be much lower in our next report. We also prioritized removing harmful content over measuring our efforts, so we may not be able to calculate the prevalence of violating content during this time. Today’s report shows the impact of advancements we’ve made in the technology we use to proactively find and remove violating content.
The report includes metrics across twelve policies on Facebook and metrics across ten policies on Instagram. The report introduces Instagram data in four issue areas: Hate Speech, Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity, Violent and Graphic Content, and Bullying and Harassment. For the first time, we are also sharing data on the number of appeals people make on the content we’ve taken action against on Instagram, and the number of decisions we overturn either based on those appeals or when we identify the issue ourselves.