Social-Media
Facebook is going to stop recommending health groups
Facebook adds new guidelines designed to slow the spread of misinformation and other offensive material to its Communities. From now on, if a group is suspended for breaching Facebook rules, its members and administrators will be temporarily unable to establish any new groups. If there are no administrators in a party, it will be archived. Facebook would not include any health-related organizations in its recommendations.
Facebook groups have been criticized for spreading disinformation and conspiracies as they are promoted by the Facebook recommendation algorithm. The new rules of the organization broaden current attempts to police them. Admins have also been discouraged from forming a new category identical to a prohibited one, for example.
Some of the new proposals promote more active community administration. If administrators step down, they may invite members to take their place; if nobody does, Facebook will apparently "suggest" admin positions to members, then archive the community if it fails. Also, if members of the group are in breach of community standards, moderators will have to approve all their posts for 30 days. If moderators consistently accept posts that breach the Facebook rules, the community may be deleted.
Health recommendations take a wider approach by focusing on a whole category of content, not a single rule-breaking behaviour. Facebook says that whilst groups can be a supportive place to provide and obtain help in challenging circumstances of life ... It is important that people get their health information from reliable sources.
The organization has also sought to restrict the dissemination of anti-vaccination material and coronavirus misinformation by other approaches, including incorporating contextual details to posts that address COVID-19 and putting banners on vaccination-related sites. Even so, its scale has made it a strong vector of false health reports.
Facebook also maintains that content from paramilitary groups and other organizations linked to violence continues to be restricted. Groups that address future abuse will be excluded and will soon be downgraded to non-violating content in the News Stream.
However, the organization struggled to identify the limits of the offending content — including tweets from a self-described militia community in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a 17-year-old militia supporter killed two people during the night of protests.
