Facebook to update its community standard to handle sarcastic posts

By Arya M Nair, Official Reporter
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The tech giant, Facebook has announced that it will alter its community standards to clarify what types of posts it considers as satirical. The judgment came after Facebook’s Oversight Board rejected the company’s decision to remove a post on the Turkish government.

In the recommendations suggested by its Oversight board which determined Facebook was wrong to remove a user’s comment with a reference to the Turkish government, based on a meme, it said that Facebook should “add a general language satire exception for users in your Community Standards for hate speech”. 

In response, the company said in a blog post, “We will add information to community standards that clarify where we consider sarcasm as part of our assessment of context-specific decisions. This change will be made by teams when assessing potential hate speech to consider satire, or violation.” It has planned to complete the update by the end of this year.

The post included a split-screen cartoon on a popular internet meme, which Facebook thought was an incentive towards Armenians. The company applied its Cruel and Insensitive Community Standard while blocking the post.

Earlier this month, Facebook said it would end its so-called “newsworthiness” policy, which allowed politicians to skirt many of its content rules. It also added that it will not treat content posted by politicians any differently from content posted by anyone else.

Facebook just recently broke down how their ad review process works to increase transparency with Facebook’s Ad Transparency tool. It is a feature that allows all users to view every single ad that a page is currently running.

Related : Facebook buys virtual reality game studio BigBox VR

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