Meta
Announcements
·
May 17, 2022

Building a Safer Future Every Day for People and Businesses: Releasing the Community Standards Enforcement Report for Q1 2022

By Samantha Stetson, VP Client Council and Industry Trade Relations


Building a safer future starts with people, and our core promise to those who use our platforms is that we will provide safe, meaningful, trusted places where they can connect with the things that matter most. We have policies—like the Community Standards—that define what is and isn’t allowed on our platforms, and we also empower both people and brands to craft the most suitable environments for themselves through tools and controls.

As part of our commitment to transparency, today we are releasing our quarterly Community Standards Enforcement Report for the first quarter of 2022, more about our independent assessment of the Community Standards Enforcement Report for the fourth quarter of 2021, our bi-annual Transparency Report, the quarterly Oversight Board Report, and the quarterly Widely Viewed Content report.

Independent Assessment of Community Standards Enforcement Report Metrics

In August of 2020, we committed to taking the unprecedented step of undertaking and releasing an independent, third-party assessment of our Community Standards Enforcement Report. No company should grade its own homework, and the credibility of our systems should be earned, not assumed. Today, we’re delivering on that commitment and publishing EY’s independent findings. EY’s independent assessment of our 2021 fourth quarter Community Standards Enforcement Report found that the calculation of the metrics were fairly stated, and our internal controls are suitably designed and operating effectively. We’re proud to lead the industry as the first platform to take this step.

EY’s assessment was focused on if we calculated our metrics accurately and had effective internal controls in place. It builds on our previous work to verify we are using the right metrics with a group of international experts in measurement, statistics, law, economics and governance, who provided an independent, public assessment of the metrics we share in the enforcement report. We continue to partner with the Oversight Board and other key stakeholders to ensure our policies effectively protect our communities, and we’ll continue seeking independent assessment going forward to verify the accuracy of our metrics.

Releasing Our Transparency Center Reports

We want to be transparent about our efforts to enforce our policies, including where there’s more work to be done. Our Transparency Center includes multiple transparency efforts and reports about our work and areas for us to improve. Our Community Standards Enforcement Report is the report we issue quarterly that shows how well we are doing at enforcing our policies. Within this report, prevalence is our most important metric. It’s an estimate of how much violating content people see on our platforms. Between the fourth quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, prevalence of harmful content on Facebook and Instagram remained relatively consistent—and decreased in some of our policy areas—partly due to our improved and expanded proactive detection technologies:

  • Hate speech prevalence on Facebook was 0.02%, or 2 views of content per 10,000 views in Q1 2022, down from 0.10-0.11% when we first began reporting it in Q3 2020.
  • This is our third time reporting on hate speech prevalence on Instagram, which has remained relatively consistent—in Q1 2022 it was at 0.02%.

This progress represents the continued impact of all the work we are investing into our safety and integrity efforts, including the proactive measures we’ve implemented. We’re always working to improve, be transparent and share meaningful data. A full view of our efforts on safety and integrity are captured in this timeline. We are proud of the progress we’ve made—and know there’s always room for improvement.

Giving Businesses More Control & Insight Over Where Their Ads Appear

We understand that businesses may have specific preferences above and beyond our Community Standards around how their ads appear next to certain content, which is why we’re prioritizing building industry-leading solutions to give advertisers more control and insight. In March, we recently provided updates on how we’ll provide more transparency and control for businesses on Feed through two new initiatives:

  1. First-Party Content Based Controls for Feed: We have committed to build first-party pre-campaign content based suitability controls that are aligned to the GARM Suitability Framework for Facebook and Instagram Feed. We plan to test in the second half of 2022 and launch in early 2023.
  2. Third-Party Brand Suitability Verification in Feed: After an extensive vetting process, we've selected Zefr as the initial partner to provide independent post campaign reporting on the context in which ads appear on Facebook Feed. We are looking to do a small scale test in the third quarter of this year and move to limited availability in the fourth quarter of this year.

To learn more about Feed controls and third-party verification, visit our Meta for Business blog post from March.

Seeking Independent Validation of our Advertiser Brand Suitability Controls

We will continue in our mission to lead the industry in transparency efforts and to provide independent review across both our reports and our advertiser controls. When it comes to our monetization policies and advertiser controls for content adjacent to ads, we are committed to independent oversight and support the Media Rating Council (MRC) as the auditor of our monetized solutions in advertising.

We are currently working with the MRC on the audit of our Content & Partner Monetization Policies and Brand Safety & Suitability Controls (currently for Facebook In Stream and Instant Article placements). Our work with the MRC is ongoing and as we expand the advertiser controls on monetized content, we expect to increase our scope of work with the MRC. For example, the first party content based suitability controls for Facebook and Instagram Feed are being developed with an understanding that the efficacy of the control, once generally available, will be validated through an MRC audit.

Our goal is to lead the technology industry in keeping people safe, giving advertisers control to create suitable environments for their brands, and providing transparency around these efforts so people can hold us accountable and businesses can feel confident about partnering with us. We’ll continue to regularly publish quarterly and bi-annual reports in our Transparency Center, and continue to update you on our progress as we build out industry-leading suitability controls.

To see today’s full Transparency Center reports announcement, please visit the Newsroom post.

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