Facebook lays out four values that guide its Community Standards, in order to promote freedom of expression: authenticity, safety, privacy, and dignity
not promoting dangerous lies. This is incredibly disappointing and shameful behavior. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Phillip Picardi / @pfpicardi : Abortion is sometimes medically necessary, and that's a fact. Facebook is corrupt, evil, and going to disrupt our Presidential election yet again with little to no consequences. (Also a fact.) https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Facebook
Context & Ripple Effects
The four values formalize a framework Facebook's policy team had been sketching since its VP of policy first drew explicit limits to free speech in 2018 — endangering people physically or financially, hateful intimidation, deception for profit. Publishing them as an ordered list turns internal moderation philosophy into a public accountability document.
Why it matters now: subsequent coverage shows the gap between stated principle and enforcement. The independent audit found holding Trump to a different standard sets a troubling precedent and concluded that valuing free expression above all else impedes civil rights, while employees and [[a:956837|third-party fact-checkers reported divisive-content decisions being overruled with little transparency]]. The values are now the yardstick against which those gaps get measured.
First-order effects
Facebook gains a published reference point it can cite when defending or revising individual policy calls — but also a fixed text critics like Phillip Picardi can quote back when enforcement appears selective.
Second-order effects
Moderation disputes shift from case-by-case arguments to claims about which value — authenticity versus freedom of expression, dignity versus safety — takes precedence, pulling auditors, fact-checkers, and employees into adjudicating the hierarchy rather than the rulebook.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, platform legitimacy rests less on any single takedown than on whether stated values and enforced outcomes converge — making independent audits and transparency reporting permanent infrastructure for content governance.
The trend: Social platforms are converting ad-hoc content rules into published value hierarchies, which then become the benchmark civil-rights audits, fact-checkers, and regulators use to judge enforcement gaps.
FB just published a blog listing four “values” the company will use as reasons to limit certain kinds of posts/speech “When we limit expression we do it in service of one or more of the following values: 1. Authenticity 2. Safety 3. Privacy 4. Dignity https://newsroom.fb.com/...
FWIW: Just got word that there used to be three values in this section of FB's community standards, now there are four. The prior three values: * Safety * Voice *Equity
Facebook has updated the values that inform its community standards, which now contain an explicit reference to “international human rights standards” 👇 Full post accessible here: https://newsroom.fb.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Regardless, these are rather broad and I'm sure that's by design. The issue with all content moderation guidelines remains how subjective they are. Protecting someone's “dignity” means very different things to different people. Anyways. There they are.
This is significant. It may look like a mere PR exercise, but this will guide the Facebook Oversight Board's interpretation of Facebook's rules and so will have meaningful practical results. 1/ https://twitter.com/...
It's pathetic how Facebook has allowed the GOP/conservatives to rig the system. The GOP has a fundamental problem with facts. Instead of telling the truth, they managed to convince Facebook their lying is actually a sign of fact-checking bias. Complete bullshit https://twitter.co…
“How can Facebook avoid charges of ‘bias’ when the entire nature of editorial decision-making is to privilege one set of views over another?” https://www.getrevue.co/... Facebook is hiring human editors. But Facebook is not an editorial company, and has no idea what it is in for.
It's unclear to me why they published this as these seem like “values” FB already uses for content decisions. The blog is described as “updated preamble” to the company's community standards.
Instead of listening to scientific experts, @facebook caved to pressure from politicians who want to ban abortion. Facebook is supposed to be fact-checking — not promoting dangerous lies. This is incredibly disappointing and shameful behavior. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
Abortion is sometimes medically necessary, and that's a fact. Facebook is corrupt, evil, and going to disrupt our Presidential election yet again with little to no consequences. (Also a fact.) https://twitter.com/...