It’s no secret that Facebook is a haven for inappropriate material. With 350 million users worldwide, it’s sort of expected that people will post dumb photos, outrageous status updates, and a whole slew of other content that would make their grandmothers cringe. Recently, Facebook took steps to correct this problem with the creation of the Facebook Community Council.
According to InsideFacebook.com, “[Facebook] isn’t providing screenshots but a Facebook representative basically describes a crowd-sourced version of admin tools for moderating flagged content report by users.” In other words, it doesn’t change how individual Facebook users report inappropriate content, but it spreads out the flagged content across an array of users to help determine whether it is in violation of Facebook’s terms of service.
The hope of the project is that by spreading the work of Facebook moderators across the Facebook community, inappropriate content can be removed more quickly, and the Facebook community can help shape the makeup of the site. According to the Inside Facebook report, there will be eight options for reporting inappropriate content: Spam, Acceptable, Skip, Not English, Nudity, Drugs, Attacking (“direct attacks against public figures”) and Violence.
In light of Facebook’s recent privacy settings snafu, the development of the Facebook Community Council is refreshing. Although it has had its problems with spammers, by and large I would say that Facebook users are pretty tuned into the website. As such, I believe that with a large enough group of participants, the Community Council could help remove some of the blatantly offensive content from Facebook without forcing the company itself to take an editorial stand.
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