Facebook docs show how it moderates users in repressive regimes, including a list of “recognized crimes” and allowing praise for mass killers in some contexts
The GuardianAlex Hern
Context & Ripple Effects
This Guardian report extends a paper trail that began in 2017, when [[a:920135|internal documents obtained by ProPublica showed Facebook unfairly punishing black users and people in disputed territories like Palestine]]. The same day's leak goes further into regime-specific rulemaking: a 'recognized crimes' list that defines punishable speech against states' own legal categories, and carve-outs allowing praise of mass killers in certain contexts.
Facebook's policy team must defend rules that defer to governments' own 'recognized crimes' lists, meaning a user's punishment can depend on which country's criminal categories their speech is measured against.
Users in repressive regimes face asymmetric enforcement right now: praise for mass killers is permitted in some contexts, while ordinary political speech risks removal when it collides with state-defined crime categories.
Second-order effects
Civil-society groups and journalists gain a reusable template — leaked internal policy docs — that turns each new region-specific failure into a comparable case study rather than isolated anecdotes.
Governments whose conduct the documents expose face pressure to justify why a private company's rules mirror their criminal codes, shifting the debate from individual takedowns to systemic policy design.
Third-order effects
If the leak-driven pattern holds, content moderation rules will increasingly be treated as a matter of regulatory oversight and mandatory transparency rather than corporate discretion, since internal documents keep proving external audits cannot rely on published standards alone.
The 'recognized crimes' mechanism points toward platforms becoming de facto arbiters of lawful speech in countries with weak institutions — a structural role that invites both government entanglement and cross-border regulatory conflict over whose definitions apply.
The trend: Platform content governance is moving from opaque, self-published community standards to externally scrutinized policy through successive leaks, building the case for mandated transparency in how speech rules vary by country.
Unfair. The issue isn't incompetence but a willful decision to put connecting and profiting first in line. “She described Facebook, which was founded in the US, as having ‘little language capability and zero cultural competency.’” https://twitter.com/...
Well this article explains a lot. It also helps illuminate the problems that just cannot be left up to an unaccountable unelected profit-oriented private company https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
For Thursday's hearing with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Congress is going to need to choose their questions between insurrection, genocide, sex trafficking, prior false testimony, antitrust and privacy abuses. Do I have this right?
Hmm- looking forward to trying to explain to my daughter (and indeed rest of my family who on the whole quite like having me around) that because her mum is a politician @Facebook gives a free pass on death threats...https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
Facebook's rules should be TRANSPARENT. They shouldn't have to be leaked for us to find out what they are. Also, the rules allow public figures to receive death threats... apparently that's not harassment?🤯 https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
The secrecy means that Facebook doesn't have to address apparent inconsistencies between the rules it applies, and the values it claims to hold. So even as the company is fighting a PR battle over the accusations that it does little to prevent abuse of black footballers...
These documents are what @Klonick described as the “case law” of Facebook's quasi-legal system. They're not the rules themselves, but they're the fine detail that allows Facebook to apply the general principles to specific situations. Except that unlike case law - they're secret.
Over the past few months, I've been going through hundreds of pages of moderation documents used by Facebook to guide its contractors over how the company's guidelines should be implemented in practice: https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
That means that only Facebook's moderators got to know the detail of the company's decisions about when to follow state law, and when to ignore it, or about how Facebook enforces the rules that ban Qanon in practice https://www.theguardian.com/ ...