Facebook has been getting a lot of negative attention in recent times for allowing people to post things like misinformation and being accused of not acting fast enough to curb it. Now it seems that in a bid to help fight back against rule breakers on its platform, the company has announced some new steps.
This includes how the platform will start to downrank posts made by these rule breakers so that they will have less visibility when they’re posting in groups. However, the interesting part of this change is that it will apply to whichever group that person is part of, meaning that if that user broke a Facebook rule in another part of the platform, the punishment will apply to all of their activities.
According to Facebook, “This measure will help reduce the ability of members who break our rules from reaching others in their communities, and builds on the existing restrictions placed upon members who violate Community Standards.” There are varying levels of “punishments” depending on how many times the user broke the rules.
For example, having one post removed for violating Facebook’s Community Standards in the previous 90 days constitutes as one level, and having multiple posts removed will result in “more severe” demotions.
It remains to be seen if any of these changes will have a meaningful impact but it’s good to see Facebook is trying.