The social network has also announced a series of new moderation rules.
Le Monde
Facebook announced that access to certain internal documents, mainly affecting its actions in terms of moderation or policy, would now be more limited, reveals the New York Times , which could consult a broadcast message to all employees in the social network.
“As you know, we have seen an increase in leaks of documents related to our integrity policy [False information] in recent months”, explains the message, sent one month after the publication A series of Wall Street Journal’s surveys based on documents carried away by an ex-Facebook employee, Frances Haugen. “These leaks give a misleading image of the shade and complexity of our work and are often out of context, resulting in erroneous interpretations externally.”
Facebook uses a company version of its own service to allow its employees to discuss between them, share documents or reflections, or coordinate projects. Part of the documents made public so far seem to come from this workspace, through which the employees of the company have access to many files.
Before M me Hauguen, who transmitted several thousand pages of internal study of Facebook to several regulators and elected in the United States, another ex-employee, Sophie Zhang, had supported on internal documents to denounce shortcomings from the social network, end 2020.
New protections for “public personalities”
The social network has also announced, Wednesday, October 13, a series of new moderation measures. The broadest concerns “public personalities”: the social network will now consider as such people who are neither elected nor stars, but who act in the public space, like “journalists and activists of the rights of the man “. The messages that “sexualize public figures”, including photomontages, will be now forbidden on Facebook
New tests on how the news feed works have also been set up, Facebook ad . In seventy-fifteen countries, a small percentage of users will now see fewer political messages in the top wire, new stage of an experience launched in February in the United States to “respond to requests from users who wish to see less than political content “. On January 6, after the attack of the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump, the social network had suspended the account of the President of the United States for incitement to violence; Facebook had been the target of many critics accusing it to contribute strongly to the polarization of the political debate in the United States during the campaign.