Leaked documents: Facebook moderators can ban Pages if admins get 5 “strikes” or if 30%+ of other people's posts violate its community standards within 90 days
Context & Ripple Effects
This leak is one installment in a running series of Facebook moderation disclosures: The Guardian published 100+ internal training manuals in 2017, and Motherboard's Joseph Cox has repeatedly been the outlet for internal rule documents since. What this document adds is the enforcement arithmetic — not what violates the rules, but how violations accumulate into a Page-level death sentence.
The mechanics matter because they extend liability beyond the admin's own conduct: a Page can be banned when 30%+ of posts from *other people* breach community standards within 90 days, meaning community-driven Pages are judged on their visitors. Five months later, the 1,400-page leak of moderator guidelines showed how hard Facebook found it to compress these judgments into yes/no rules.
First-order effects
- Page admins now face a quantified enforcement regime — five strikes or a 30% violation rate among visitor posts in 90 days triggers a ban — making large, open-community Pages structurally riskier to run than tightly moderated ones.
Second-order effects
- Facebook extended the same repeat-offender logic upward six months later, announcing it would remove entire networks of fraudulent pages and groups run by people who had previously breached its rules — moving from punishing individual Pages to punishing coordinated operators.
Third-order effects
- Each successive leak — training manuals, then the full ruleset, then strike thresholds — turns Facebook's private enforcement code into an auditable public text, raising pressure on all major platforms to justify and standardize rules that were never designed for outside scrutiny.
The trend: Platform content moderation is shifting from ad-hoc moderator judgment to codified, quantitative enforcement rules — and every leak of those rules converts internal policy into a public accountability problem.