Facebook’s Failure to Enforce Its Own Rules
Pages are fabricating metrics and overriding bans
This is the last installment of The Micro-Propaganda Machine, a three-part analysis critically examining the issues at the interface of platforms, propaganda, and politics.
The third part of my analysis of Facebook prior to the midterm election, looks at granular enforcement and Facebook’s challenges in enforcing its community standards and terms of service. This post highlights the long-term gaming of the platform’s engagement numbers and interaction metrics by several recently removed pages and presents a case of the company’s failure to identify and remove content from InfoWars, a removed—or “banned”—presence on the platform.
At first glance, Facebook’s efforts to identify “inauthentic” accounts, find and ban actors who have violated its terms of service and platform rules, and flag “false news” might appear to be moderately successful. Through my investigation of the platform, however, there appears to be a longstanding pattern of ineffective rules paired with inconsistent enforcement. This has opened up many loopholes and workarounds for certain pages and actors and facilitated the misuse and exploitation of Facebook’s platform.
A number of high-profile and previously unreleased data findings shine a light on Facebook’s granular enforcement problem, which seems to be expanding at a rate that is outpacing the company’s ability to dedicate enough resources to contain it.
While recent platform integrity initiatives at Facebook have worked in some ways, the most important functions—including the proactive removal of inauthentic and banned accounts—does not appear to be working nearly as well as it should.
To the company’s credit, there have been a spate of publicly announced removals and takedowns. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO and arguably the final decision-maker, finally recognized the long-term problem, going so far as to suggest that the company needs help from researchers and journalists. Facebook has been at work identifying and removing inauthentic accounts and spammy pages that have gamed its system and/or violated its terms of service. One of the most publicized instances of this was the company’s October 11, 2018 removal of…