Facebook Updates 'Community Standards' of Activity on its Site

Social media giant Facebook has updated a set of standards on what is acceptable to share on its platform, a press release from the company on Monday said.

Facebook's "community standards" look to "help people understand what is acceptable to share on Facebook", the company said in the statement.

"These standards are designed to create an environment where people feel motivated and empowered to treat each other with empathy and respect."

Facebook said that it would be "providing more detail and clarity on what is and is not allowed. For example, what exactly do we mean by nudity, or what do we mean by hate speech."

Recommended: Gender Ceases to be Predefined on Facebook

The updated community standards, unveiled by the Mark Zuckerberg-founded popular social media company, broadly aim at keeping users safe, their accounts and personal information secure, encouraging respectful behaviour and protecting the users' intellectual property.

"In particular, we've provided more guidance on policies related to self-injury, dangerous organisations, bullying and harassment, criminal activity, sexual violence and exploitation, nudity, hate speech, and violence and graphic content," the Facebook statement said.

The company noted that it was a challenge to maintain one set of standards that met the needs of a diverse global community.

"For one thing, people from different backgrounds may have different ideas about what's appropriate to share -- a video posted as a joke by one person might be upsetting to someone else, but it may not violate our standards," the statement said.

If people considered pages, profiles or individual pieces of content to violate the Facebook community standards, they could report them to the company.

Facebook said that there could be occasions when the company might have "to remove or restrict access to content because it violates a law in a particular country, even though it doesn't violate our community standards".

"In some countries, for example, it is against the law to share content regarded as being blasphemous," the statement noted.

Recommended: Want to free Internet? Do philanthropy: Mittal to Zuckerberg

"While blasphemy is not a violation of the community standards, we will still evaluate the reported content and restrict it in that country if we conclude it violates local law," Facebook revealed.

However, it added that the company would challenge requests that appear to be unreasonable or overbroad.

"And if a country requests that we remove content because it is illegal in that country, we will not necessarily remove it from Facebook entirely, but may restrict access to it in the country where it is illegal."

The company revealed the number of government requests to restrict content in its Global Government Requests Report.

Overall, there was an increase in government requests for data and content restrictions, Facebook reported.

There was a rise in content restriction requests from countries like Turkey and Russia, and fall in places like Pakistan, the company said.

Source: IANS