Publication

Policy Recommendations: How to make Facebook more secure and fair for its users

Based on the analysis of online information space prior to Slovak 2020 Parliamentary Elections, the Democracy & Resilience Programme provides key recommendations on how to tackle the uncontrollable spread of misinformation and harmful content on social media. The analysis Slovak Parliamentary Election 2020: Liberalism as a Threat, Facebook as a Battlefield can be found here.

6 recommendations for Facebook, national, and EU authorities:

  1. Create a designated contact/office for each EU member state, which will be responsible for: a) communication with state institutions, delivery of comprehensive databases about political advertisements, as well as reported and deleted content; b) posting advance notice of planned modifications to community standards on a specific social medium in order to consult with relevant authorities about the proposed modifications prior to their implementation.
  2. Ensure the enforcement of rules that secure the transparency of targeted ads and thus increase the users’ awareness. At the same time, task Facebook with the automatic and regular delivery of information about all paid ads to national institutions supervising the financing of political campaigns.
  3. Accelerate and increase the effectiveness of the removal of problematic content reported to Facebook by a verified trusted flagger.
  4. Develop a complaint system for cases when social media fail in the removal of content sharing hate speech, extremism or targeted bullying of individuals. The complaints should be promptly taken over by relevant state and EU institutions with competences to issue a financial penalisation of the social media platform for such failures.
  5. Hire more local experts to oversee the quality of content-moderation and provide data about the competency to resolve individual cases to independent institutions and analysts for auditing purposes.
  6. Provide reasoning behind any account deletion or post-removal to prevent the spread of conspiracies about Facebook censorship.

Download the recommendations below. 

Authors

Director, Centre for Democracy & Resilience

Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Democracy & Resilience

Former Project Coordinator, Democracy & Resilience

Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Democracy & Resilience

Authors

Director, Centre for Democracy & Resilience

Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Democracy & Resilience

Former Project Coordinator, Democracy & Resilience

Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Democracy & Resilience