A new Facebook policy is supposed to protect celebrities, journalists, and other public figures who could be targeted by coordinated harassment campaigns.
“We will now remove coordinated efforts of mass harassment that target individuals at heightened risk of offline harm, for example victims of violent tragedies or government dissidents—even if the content on its own wouldn’t violate our policies,” Facebook said today. “We will also remove objectionable content that is considered mass harassment towards any individual on personal surfaces, such as direct messages in inbox or comments on personal profiles or posts.”
The company also says it’s expanding existing anti-bullying and harassment policies to prohibit:
- Severe sexualizing content
- Profiles, Pages, groups or events dedicated to sexualizing the public figure
- Derogatory, sexualized photoshopped images and drawings
- Attacks through negative physical descriptions that are tagged to, mention or posted on the public figure’s account
- Degrading content depicting individuals in the process of bodily functions
Facebook made these changes “because attacks like these can weaponize a public figure’s appearance,” it says, “which is unnecessary and often not related to the work these public figures represent.” The company will also “offer more protections for public figures like journalists and human rights defenders who have become famous involuntarily or because of their work” to combat the bullying and harassment that often seems to come part and parcel with becoming popular online.
This harassment often comes from people and groups who decide to harass someone purely for personal reasons. But that isn’t always the case, so Facebook says it will “remove state-linked and adversarial networks of accounts, Pages, and Groups that work together to harass or silence people, for example a state-sponsored organization using closed private groups to coordinate mass posting on dissident profiles,” as part of its efforts to better protect these campaigns’ targets.
The introduction of these new policies was clearly timed to coincide with National Bullying Prevention and Awareness Day. But it also follows weeks of reports alleging that Facebook hasn’t done enough to protect its users—especially children and teenagers—from the dangers of using its platform. (And of Sudanese and Iranian propaganda networks using its platform to criticize their opposition.) The company is coming under increasing scrutiny; it can use a feel-good announcement like this.
There’s also a bit of irony in this aspect of the announcement: “These groups [journalists and human rights advocates] will now have protections from harmful content, for example content that ranks their physical looks, as other involuntary public figures do.” Remember that Facebook got its start as a website called FaceMash that, as Wikipedia puts it, “allowed visitors to compare two female [Harvard] students’ pictures side by side and let them decide who was more attractive.”
That doesn’t necessarily detract from this announcement. Expanding protections to prevent coordinated harassment against public figures, especially if it’s sexual in nature, is a welcome change. But these problems aren’t novel in any way.
