WSJ Warns of Facebook’s ‘Secret Rules’ Behind Censorship and Shadow Banning

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  • Source: Breitbart
  • 05/05/2021
The Wall Street Journal published an essay Wednesday warning of Facebook’s “secret rules” used to police users’ accounts and remove “offensive” material.

In the article, writer Kirsten Grind notes that social media users can wind up in “Facebook jail” for the strangest of reasons, including “sharing a link to a story in Smithsonian magazine about tribal New Guinea.”

Yet perhaps even more worrisome than Facebook suspensions and outright content removal is the tech giant’s frequent recourse to shadow banning, the diminishment of the visibility of certain posts or entire accounts without the users’ awareness.

“Facebook increasingly polices content in ways that aren’t disclosed to users, in hopes of avoiding disputes over its decisions, according to current and former employees,” Grind writes.

“The algorithms bury questionable posts, showing them to fewer users, quietly restricting the reach of those suspected of misbehavior rather than taking down the content or locking them out of the platform entirely,” she adds.

In this way, Facebook is able to manipulate the ideas being expressed on its platform without having to give an explanation for the rationale behind its decisions.

According to Grind, Facebook has acknowledged this practice in certain cases.

“To protect state elections in India, it said in a March blog post that it would ‘significantly reduce the distribution of content that our proactive detection technology identifies as likely hate speech or violence and incitement,’” she observes.

In its quarterly Community Standards Enforcement report, Facebook declared it had taken down 6.3 million pieces of content under the “bullying and harassment” category during the fourth quarter of 2020, an increase of 3.5 million from the third quarter, in part because of “increasing our automation abilities.”
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