Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit into address intervening events or provide input on time-sensitive challenges (as well as the COVID-19 crisis), the Auditors and Facebook were unable to conduct a detailed, comprehensive assessment of Facebook’s harassment infrastructure as was done on hate speech in the 2019 report or as was done on Appeals and Penalties in this report. As a result, the Auditors cannot speak directly to the effectiveness of the changes Facebook has implemented over the last year, which are described here. However, the Auditors felt it was still important to describe these changes for purposes of transparency, and to flag the specific areas where the Auditors believe there is more work to be done. On the policy side, Facebook has now adopted the Auditors’ recommendation to ban content that explicitly calls for harassment on the platform, and will begin enforcement in July 2020. This policy update responds to concerns raised by the civil rights community regarding Facebook being too reactive and piecemeal in responding to organized harassment. In addition, Facebook has begun working with human rights activists outside the US to better understand their experiences and the impact of Facebook’s policies from a human rights perspective, which could ultimately lead to recommendations for additional policy, product, and operational improvements to protect activists. On the enforcement side, Facebook reports it has built new tools to detect harassing behavior proactively, including detection of language that is harassing, hateful, or sexual in nature. Content surfaced by the technology is sent to specialized operations teams that take a two-pronged approach, looking both at the content itself and the cluster of accounts targeting the user. Facebook reports using these tools to detect harassment against certain categories of users at a heightened risk of being attacked (e.g., journalists), but is exploring how to scale application and enforcement more broadly to better mitigate the harm of organized harassment for all users, including activists. When it comes to bulk reporting of harassment, however, Facebook has made less tangible progress. Last year the Auditors recommended that Facebook develop mechanisms for bulk reporting of content and/or functionality that would enable a targeted user to block or report harassers en masse, rather than requiring individual reporting of each piece of content (which can be burdensome, emotionally draining, and time-consuming). In October 2018, Facebook launched a feature that allowed people to hide or delete multiple comments at once from the options menu of their post, but did not allow multiple comments to be reported as violating. The feature is no longer available due to negative feedback on the user experience. Facebook reports that it is exploring a reboot of this feature and/or other product interventions that could better address mass harassment — which may or may not be coordinated. A feature was recently launched on Instagram that allows users to select up to 25 comments and then delete comments or block the accounts posting them in bulk; the Auditors believe that Facebook should explore doing something similar because it is important that Facebook users are able to report comments in bulk so that harassers (including those not expressly coordinating harassment campaigns with others) face penalties for their behavior. 5. White Nationalism In the last Audit Report, the Auditors restrained their praise for Facebook’s then-new ban on white nationalism and white separatism because, in the Auditors’ view, the policy is too narrow in that it only prohibits content expressly using the phrase(s) “white nationalism” or “white separatism,” and does not prohibit content that explicitly espouses the very same ideology without using those exact phrases. At that time, the Auditors recommended that Facebook 50

Select target paragraph3