Please see Facebook’s Community Standards.

Facebook publishes quarterly Community Standards Enforcement Reports which provide information about the company’s enforcement actions across a number of categories such as violence, nudity and hate speech. In this report, we disclose the prevalence of several types of violating content on Facebook and Instagram, the amount of this content we took action on, the amount of content we found proactively before people reported it, the amount of content we actioned that people appealed, and the amount of content we restored after removing it.

Additional information on Facebook’s enforcement of its community standards can be found here.

Facebook publicly reports metrics on how well we enforce our community standards in quarterly Community Standards Enforcement reports. We believe that measuring and reporting these numbers on a regular basis is important. It lets others see how we’re doing and hold us accountable – and it helps us measure progress and spot places where we can do better.

We work to ensure that the information we share is useful and accurate. To this end, in 2019, we worked with international experts in measurement, statistics, law, economics and governance to provide an independent, public assessment of whether the metrics we share in the enforcement report provide accurate and useful measures of Facebook’s content moderation challenges and our work to address them. They broadly agreed that we are looking at the right metrics and provided some recommendations for improvement, including launching appeals reporting. You can read the full report here.

Facebook has also committed to a third party audit of our content moderation systems, including the accuracy of our Community Standards Enforcement Reports.

Keeping people safe is one of our biggest priorities at Facebook and we are proud to be an industry leader in this area. Our commitment to encryption is a continuation of our commitment to user safety, as encryption helps keep people safe from hackers and criminals. This is critical as more of our information moves online. Our approach has three key elements: prevention, detection and response:

• Prevention: We are particularly focused on prevention because we believe it is much better to stop harmful activity before it happens.
• Detection: We are designing ways to catch those who, despite our best prevention efforts, violate our policies or use our tools to cause harm.
• Response: We use our learnings from our prevention and detection work to continually respond to the evolving threat. We are also investing in encouraging more user reporting so that we can leverage those reports to protect users.

More information on our approach and work can be found in the following resources:

• Preventing Unwanted Contacts and Scams in Messenger (5/21/2020)
• Facebook’s Response to Open Letter on Private Messaging (12/10/2019)
• Hard Questions: Why Does Facebook Enable End-to-End Encryption? (5/7/2019)

Our policies help protect against child exploitation and content or behavior on our platform that puts the safety of children at risk. We use sophisticated technology and behavioral signals not only to prevent, detect and remove images and videos that exploit children, but also to detect and prevent grooming, or potentially inappropriate interactions between a minor and an adult. See the following resources for more information on our efforts here:

• Preventing Child Exploitation on Our Apps (2/23/2021)
• Facebook Joins Industry Effort to Fight Child Exploitation Online (6/11/2020)
• Preventing Unwanted Contacts and Scams in Messenger (5/21/2020)

As noted in Facebook’s Community Standards, we do not tolerate bullying and harassment on our services. We work to proactively stop bullying before it happens, and in cases when we are not able to prevent it, we provide tools to help people control their experience. Please see the following resources for more information on our efforts:

• Continuing Our Work to Fight Online Bullying (5/12/2020)
• Our Commitment to Keeping People Safe (2/11/2020)

Information on Facebook’s counterterrorism work can be found in the Counterterrorism section of our Newsroom. You can also review Facebook’s enforcement action against terrorist content on our platforms in the Community Standards Enforcement Report.

We do not allow hate speech on Facebook. See our community standards for more information on our policy around hate speech.

Facebook reports on its enforcement of violating hate speech and organized hate in its Community Standards Enforcement report.

We also signed the European Commission’s code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online. As part of this code of conduct, the European Commission runs regular independent tests on each company that signed on to make sure they are removing this content quickly and effectively. The fifth report was published in June 2020, and it showed that we are reviewing reports of hate speech quicker than before, deleting more of it and doing it transparently.

Facebook takes a number of actions to combat the spread of misinformation and promote the safety and authenticity of people’s experiences on our platform:

• We remove accounts and content that violate our Community Standards.
• We partner with fact-checking organizations around the world to fact check content on our platforms. When these organizations classify something as false, we dramatically reduce its distribution. We also apply strong warning labels on top of the content with research from fact-checkers and send notifications to people who try to share the post or already have.
• We also partner with local organizations around the world to promote news literacy.

In an effort to prevent and disrupt real-world harm, we do not allow any organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence to have a presence on Facebook. We leverage artificial intelligence to proactively find and remove violating content that contains terrorism and organized hate before people see it. Information on our enforcement of community standards against dangerous organizations can be found in our Community Standards Enforcement Report.

When we do receive reports of potential terrorism posts, we review those reports urgently and with scrutiny. And in the rare cases when we uncover evidence of imminent harm, we promptly inform authorities.

We also partner with other technology companies through the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism to jointly prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms.

Please review the below updates for more information on our actions:

• An Update to How We Address Movements and Organizations Tied to Violence (1/19/2021)
• An Update on Combating Hate and Dangerous Organizations (5/12/2020)
• Next Steps for the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (9/23/2019)
• Combating Hate and Extremism (9/17/2019)
• Global Internet Forum To Counter Terrorism: An Update on Our Progress Two Years on (7/24/2019)

For updates on Facebook’s efforts to protect against election interference, please review our Preparing for Elections site and the Election Integrity section of Facebook’s Newsroom.

In a democracy, people should decide what is credible, not technology companies - we don’t believe a private company should censor politicians.

This is why we don’t send content or ads from politicians to our third party fact checking partners. We believe that by limiting speech or removing content, we’d leave people less informed about what their elected officials are saying and leave politicians less accountable for their words.

Our policies don’t mean that politicians can say whatever they want on Facebook. They can’t spread misinformation about where, when or how to vote, for example, or incite violence. And when it comes to ads, while we won’t remove politicians’ ads based solely on the outcome of a fact check, we still require them to follow our advertising policies.

The Community Standards - the rules that govern what can and cannot be posted on our platform - are grounded by five core values that include creating a place for expression and giving people a voice, as well as dignity as a fundamental right. There is a rigorous and participatory process for reviewing and revising these policies which includes consultations with human rights experts and due diligence by our human rights team. We have a formal Stakeholder Engagement statement that forms the basis for this work. To ensure that everyone’s voice is valued, we take great care to craft policies that are inclusive of different views and beliefs, in particular those of people and communities that might otherwise be overlooked or marginalized.

We have committed to report annually on how we’re addressing human rights impacts, including relevant insights arising from human rights due diligence, and the actions we are taking in response.

For more information, please review Facebook’s Corporate Human Rights Policy.