Facebook to send Groups on probation for violating content rules

The move is to slow the spread of misinformation on its platform, Facebook told The Washington Post on Sunday.

San Francisco: Facebook has announced to send Groups that violate its content rules on a sort of probation, like forcing Group moderators to manually approve all posts for 60 days.

The move is to slow the spread of misinformation on its platform, Facebook told The Washington Post on Sunday.

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Facebook will restrict all Groups with multiple posts violating its community standards.

“Moderators for the groups will have to approve any posts manually for 60 days, and there’s no appeal available for groups on probationary status”.

During the probationary period, Facebook will keep tabs on how the moderators of restricted groups deal with posts.

If they continue to allow posts that break its rules, Facebook may shut down the Groups.

“We are temporarily requiring admins and moderators of some political and social groups in the US to approve all posts, if their group has a number of Community Standards violations from members,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Verge.

Facebook has witnessed a meteoric rise in the spread of misinformation on its platform as crucial votes were being tallied to select the next US president.

In a post to a group on Facebook’s internal message board, one employee alerted their colleagues to a nearly 45 per cent increase in the metric, which assesses the potential for danger based on hashtags and search terms in the last election week, reports BuzzFeed News.

The social networking giant last week banned a fast-growing group called “Stop the Steal”.

The group was formed by Republican supporters and “members used it to sow discord about the vote-totaling process, organize protests, and make threats”.

The ‘Stop the Steal’ group amassed more than 360,000 members in less than 48 hours before it was shut down by Facebook.

Facebook announced several measures to reduce the spread of misinformation on its platforms before the November 3 election.

It also labeled a couple of tweets on “election theft” and mail-in ballots as misleading by Donald Trump.