U.S./Israel-Iran/Lebanon Conflict
We took a variety of actions with the objectives of:
- Helping to keep people in the region safe: we continue to provide user controls including Hidden Words, Limits, Comment Controls, Show More/Show Less and Sensitive
Content Control to help people manage what they see and who can interact with them. - Enforcing our policies: We continue to enforce our community standards, not only on content shared from within the affected countries, but globally wherever the content may be shared
- Reducing the spread of misinformation: we worked with our third-party fact-checking partners in the region and consulted outside experts.
- Monitoring for adversarial networks: we continue to monitor for and remove coordinated inauthentic behaviour targeting discourse about the conflict.
Our main strategies focus on user safety controls in the affected markets, extensive steps to fight the spread of misinformation, and monitoring/taking action against any coordinated inauthentic behaviour.
War of aggression by Russia on Ukraine
We took a variety of actions with the objectives of:
- Helping to keep people in Ukraine and Russia safe: since the beginning of the full-scale invasions we have introduced several privacy and safety features to help people in Ukraine and Russia protect their accounts from being targeted.
- Enforcing our policies: We are taking additional steps to enforce our Community Standards, not only in Ukraine and Russia but also in other countries globally where content may be shared.
- Reducing the spread of misinformation: We took steps to fight the spread of misinformation on our services and consulted with outside experts.
- Transparency around state-controlled media: We have been working hard to tackle disinformation from Russia coming from state-controlled media. Since March 2022, we have been globally demoting content from Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts from Russian state-controlled media outlets and making them harder to find across our platforms. In addition to demoting, labelling, demonetising and blocking ads from Russian State Controlled Media, we are also demoting and labelling any posts from users that contain links to Russian State Controlled Media websites.
- In addition to these global actions, in Ukraine, the EU and UK, we have restricted access to Russia Today (globally), Sputnik, NTV/NTV Mir, Rossiya 1, REN TV and Perviy Kanal and others.
- We added restrictions to further state-controlled media organisations targeted by the EU broadcast ban under Article 2f of Regulation 833/2014. These included additional accounts or subdomains of Russian media outlets of various NTV programmes, Rodina magazine, TV Centre, Radio Mayak, Radio Rossii, Vladimir Solovyov (vrsoloviev), Moskva 24, MTRK Mir network channels, TASS, Channel One, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and Vzglyad.ru.
Israel - Hamas War
Mitigations in place or planned - at time of reporting:
In the wake of the 07/10/2023 terrorist attacks in Israel and Israel’s response in Gaza, expert teams from across Meta took immediate crisis response measures, while protecting people’s ability to use our apps to shed light on important developments happening on the ground. As we did so, we were guided by core human rights principles, including respect for the right to life and security of the person, the protection of the dignity of victims, and the right to non-discrimination - as well as balancing those with the right to freedom of expression. We looked to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to prioritise and mitigate the most salient human rights risks: in this case, that people may use Meta platforms to further inflame an already violent conflict. We also looked to international humanitarian law (IHL) as an important source of reference for assessing online conduct. We have provided a
public overview of our efforts related to the war in our Newsroom, as well as in our 2023 Annual Human Rights
report. We provided an update on our actions in our
2024 annual human rights report. The following are some examples of the specific steps we have taken:
Taking Action on Violating Content:
Safety and Security:
- We memorialise accounts when we receive a request from a friend or family member of someone who has passed away, to provide a space for people to pay their respects, share memories and support each other.
Reducing the Spread of Misinformation:
- We’re working with third-party fact-checkers in the region to debunk false claims. Meta’s third-party fact-checking network includes Arabic- and Hebrew-language coverage for Israel and Palestine through AFP and Reuters. When they rate something as false, we move this content lower in Feed so fewer people see it.
- We recognise the importance of speed in moments like this, so we’ve made it easier for fact-checkers to find and rate content related to the war, using keyword detection to group related content in one place.
- We’re also giving people more information to help them decide what to read, trust, and share, by adding warning labels on content rated false by third-party fact-checkers and applying labels to state-controlled media publishers.
- We also have limits on message forwarding and we label messages that haven’t originated with the sender so people are aware that something is information from a third party.
User Controls:
We continue to provide
tools to help people control their experience on our apps and protect themselves from content they don’t want to see. These include but aren’t limited to:
- Hidden Words: This tool filters offensive terms and phrases from DM requests and comments.
- Limits: When turned on, Limits automatically hide DM requests and comments on Instagram from people who don’t follow you, or who only recently followed you.
- Comment controls: You can control who can comment on your posts on Facebook and Instagram and choose to turn off comments completely on a post-by-post basis.
- Show More, Show Less: This gives people direct control over the content they see on Facebook.
- Facebook Reduce: Through the Facebook Feed Preferences settings, people can increase the degree to which we demote some content so they see less of it in their Feed.
- Sensitive Content Control: Instagram’s Sensitive Content Control allows people to choose how much sensitive content they see in places where we recommend content, such as Explore, Search, Reels and in-Feed recommendations.
