Facebook Updates Its Community Standard Following Recommendations From Oversight Board

Facebook Inc. has announced that it will update its community standards to explain how it treats satirical content according to recommendations from the Oversight Board. The change stems from a case involving a user who posted a meme satirizing “the Turkish government’s efforts to deny the Armenian genocide.”

The update comes after the Oversight Board determined that Facebook was wrong to remove a user’s comment with a reference to the Turkish government, based on the two buttons meme. The Oversight Board described it:

“This meme featured the same split-screen cartoon from the original meme, but with the cartoon character’s face substituted for a Turkish flag. The cartoon character has their right hand on their head and appears to be sweating. Above the cartoon character, in the other half of the split-screen, there are two red buttons with corresponding labels, in English: “The Armenian Genocide is a lie” and “The Armenians were terrorists who deserved it.” The meme was preceded and followed by “thinking face” emoji.”

The Oversight Board noted in its decision that Facebook has previously indicated it makes exceptions to its rules for some satirical content, but that policy isn’t outlined in its official guidelines. Now, Facebook says it will do more to clarify how it handles satire.

“We’ll add information to the Community Standards that makes it clear where we consider satire as part of our assessment of context-specific decisions,” Facebook writes in an update. “This change will allow teams to consider satire when assessing potential Hate Speech violations.”

The promise to update the language of its community standards is the only firm commitment Facebook made as a result of this case. The board made several other recommendations, including that users should be able to cite exceptions to Facebook’s hate speech rules when appealing a moderation decision. Facebook said it’s “assessing feasibility” for this and other recommendations. The company said it's "developing a framework for assessing humor and satire," but that such a process may be difficult to scale to all its content moderators.

It’s not the first time Facebook has modified its rules in response to the Oversight Board. The company previously clarified its hate speech rules on the advice of the board. And the company agreed to walk back some aspects of its “newsworthiness” policy that allowed politicians to break its rules.