Rules for deleting posts from Facebook appear online

The rules for removing posts from Facebook have appeared online. Although the rules are outdated, many of them still apply, according to the social network. Facebook protects entire groups, but not parts of groups.

Website ProPublica publishes about the rules. The rules are for the Facebook employees who rate content as users who report to the social network. The document includes a quiz question with three pictures, translated below as ‘female drivers’, ‘black children’ and ‘white men’. When asked ‘which of these three groups do we protect?’ the answer is ‘white men’, because Facebook sees them as a whole group and the rest as part of a larger whole. Facebook users are allowed to write hate messages about sharing groups, but not about entire groups.

Users are also allowed to say about migrants that they are ‘lazy and dirty’ or that they are ‘thieves and muggers’, but they are not allowed to refer to migrants as ‘dirty’. It also blocks terrorist posts, retaining a US government list and defining it as a group that uses premeditated violence to achieve a political or ideological goal. Despite this, there are many groups that Facebook does not block, including 41 of the 64 groups that the Pakistani government considers terrorists.

Using the American perspective causes problems not only in the Middle East, but also in Europe. For example, Facebook does not allow anti-Semitism, but denial of the Holocaust does. Facebook admits the rules exist.

Under the rules, Facebook should have blocked posts from then-candidate and now US President Donald Trump, but Zuckerberg decided not to, according to site sources, because the posts were part of the “political discourse.”