Yogyakarta, November 19th 2020—Center for Digital Society came back again with the 9th of Obrolan dan Opini Seputar Dunia Digital program or OPOSiT. This time, CfDS cooperated with Facebook Indonesia in discussing how to report inappropriate contents on social media. Titled as “How to Report Content on Social Media”, the discussion that was aired on Instagram Live and Facebook of CfDS presented Karissa Swajaldy the Manager of Public Management of Facebook Indonesia, as a speaker.
As usual, the discussion was opened with an introduction and initial greeting from the moderator—Ruth Tarullyna, Partnership Project Officer of CfDS. The moderator also explained briefly the discussion topics that will be delivered. “This topic was chosen because we will enter the 2020 regional election (regional head election) period. We see social media, especially Facebook and Instagram, have a big role as the campaign media for prospective candidates,” Ruth mentioned. With the large number of users of both social media, concerns have arisen regarding the spread of hoaxes and misinformation. Thus, a system for reporting and curating information from social media users is needed.
After introducing and greeting the speakers, the moderator invited the speakers to talk about the topics. Karissa, or Ica, explained that Facebook actually has a community standard. Basically community standard is a guide about what could be uploaded or not on the social media platforms.
CfDS and Facebook Indonesia also provided an informative video that discusses deeper, way by way, about the reporting mechanisms on Facebook and Instagram. Not only that, this video also discusses community standards that Ica talked about at the beginning, as well as how to identify hoaxes.
Ica explained that Facebook has a very firm attitude when it comes to hoaxes and misinformation. Facebook, as a platform manager, seeks to balance freedom of expression and user security—including those related to hoaxes and misinformation—by adopting three pillars of the approach: remove, reduce, and re-inform (provide additional information). With remove, Facebook will delete all of the contents that violate community standards. There are several relevant things in the community standards to reduce misinformation and hoax on the platform, that is detecting and forbidding fake accounts.
However, there is also misinformation that doesn’t violate community standards, but is still harmful to users. In this case, Facebook is trying to reduce the spread or distribution of this information, so that not many users can see this information. When people see this misinformation, Facebook will take action in the form of re-informing—Facebook will display news or articles that are relevant to the uploaded content.
The viewers also had the opportunity to ask Ica through the comments column and this would be read by Ruth as the moderator. “We can participate, we can control what we see, and we can support the eradication of fake news or the eradication of hoaxes,” Ruth said, concluding the entire OPOSiT discussion this time, as well as closing the discussion. Reruns of the 9th OPOSiT and the informative video broadcast can be watched on the official IGTV CfDS channel.