‘Pages You May Like,’ ‘People You May Know,’ or ‘Groups You Should Join’, such personalised recommendations facilitate better social media engagement on Facebook. While these customised recommendations help users discover things that they love can these recommendations also expose them, especially, the young users, to objectionable content?
Facebook recommendations are highly personalised, relevant, unique, and valuable to each person, yet these need to be filtered as per specific guidelines and standards. Guy Rosen, VP Integrity from Facebook has himself stated that since Facebook recommendations don’t come from accounts that a user has chosen to follow, so Facebook must follow specific standards to manage and regulate what it recommends.
Taking the cue, Facebook has made its Recommendation Guidelines public on 31st August ’20, developed by consulting 50 specialised experts of digital expression, safety, and rights. Adhering to these guidelines, Facebook will stop recommending certain content/accounts/entities holding them as objectionable, low-quality, or particularly sensitive. The goal is to maintain a safe and positive experience over the Facebook platform.
The Basics of Recommendation Guidelines
Since 2016, Facebook has abided by the “remove, reduce, and inform” strategy to manage the problematic content on Facebook. The strategy ensures that Facebook content complies with its Community Standards; accordingly, it focuses on:
- Removing the content that doesn’t comply with its community standards
- Reducing the spread of problematic content
- Informing the users to be mindful of what they are clicking and sharing
The new set of Recommendation Guidelines also fits into this strategy and based on that Facebook has shortlisted five categories of content that Facebook won’t recommend.
Five Categories of Content not Eligible for Facebook Recommendations
Facebook won’t recommend any kind of content/posts/videos/ related to the following five restricted categories. It will also not recommend any of those accounts and entities (pages, groups, and events) that create, post, and share such objectionable content.
P.S: The content for the listed five categories is still allowed on Facebook (until and unless it violates Facebook Community Standards), but it won’t be shown in places where recommend content is shown
Category 1: Content that risks fostering of a safe community
- Content related to self-harm, suicide, or eating disorders*
- Content depicting violence*
- Sexually explicit or suggestive content*
- Content promoting certain regulated products such as tobacco, pharmaceutical drugs, vaping products, etc.*
- Content shared by any non-recommendable entity or account
Category 2: Health or finance related low-quality content or sensitive content
- Content promoting or depicting cosmetic procedures
- Content containing exaggerated or miraculous health claims
- Selling products or services based on exaggerated health claims, such as weight loss supplements
- Content with misleading or deceptive business models, such as risk-free investments, pay-day loans
Category 3: Broadly ‘disliked’ content on Facebook, such as
- Content with clickbait and engagement bait
- Content promoting a contest or giveaway
- Content with links to low-quality landing pages or deceptive domains, such as landing pages filled with malicious ads or click-through
Category 4: Low-quality published content
- Unoriginal content repurposed from other sources without adding material value
- Content from web sites with a disproportionate number of clicks from Facebook as well as other places on the web
- News content without transparent information about editorial staff or authorship
Category 5: Misleading or false content
- The content found false by independent fact-checkers*
- Vaccine-related misinformation, debunked by global health organisations.
- Content promoting the use of fraudulent documents, medical prescriptions, etc.*
Please Note: All the * marked content doesn’t abide by Facebook Community Standards; hence Facebook tends to remove such content from the platform.
Account and Entity not Eligible for Facebook Recommendations
As stated above, Facebook won’t recommend those accounts or entities (Page, Group, or Event) that are repeatedly posting or sharing content related to the categories mentioned above. Besides, Facebook will also avoid recommending those accounts and entities that fall under the following categories:
- Recently violated Facebook’s Community Standards.
- Banned from running ads on Facebook
- It is associated with offline organisations tied to violence.
Conclusion
By making the Recommendations Guidelines public, Facebook endeavours to provide its users with an insight into what kind of content Facebook won’t recommend. This will help content creators as they can avoid engaging with restricted categories of content. Also, users can become more informed about practising safe and positive social media engagement.
Tags: Content Marketing, Facebook, Facebook Community, Facebook marketing, Facebook tips, Likes, Social Listening, Social Media, Social Media Marketing