Facebook to take down groups that violate community guidelines

Social media giant Facebook has announced key measures to prevent its interest-based forums called Groups, both public and private, from spreading hate speech and misinformation. The measures come after the platform faced criticism for its groups being linked to protests that led up to the Capitol riot in the US earlier this year.

“This is why we recently removed civic and political groups, as well as newly created groups, from recommendations in the US. While people can still invite friends to these groups or search for them, we have now started to expand these restrictions globally,” Tom Alison, Vice President of Engineering at Facebook said in a blogpost.

The new changes will be rolled out globally over the coming months. Facebook said when a group starts to violate its rules, it will now start showing them lower in recommendations, which means it is less likely that people will discover them.