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By Justin Osofsky, VP of Global Operations

We know there are a lot of questions, misunderstandings and accusations around Facebook’s content review practices — including how we as a company care for and compensate the people behind this important work. We are committed to working with our partners to demand a high level of support for their employees; that’s our responsibility and we take it seriously. We know there are going to be incidents of employee dissatisfaction or hardship that call our commitment into question, which is why we’re taking the steps outlined below to continue to set and enforce the expectations we have for our partners.

Below is a post I shared with employees over the weekend about how we approach this work. It has been edited only to remove internal links.

First, a bit of background. Over the past couple of years, as you know, we have substantially scaled our investment in safety and security including rapidly growing our content review teams. We’ve more than doubled this team each of the last two years, adding thousands of people to these efforts. The majority are people who work full time for our partners and work at sites managed by these partners.

In order to scale this quickly, we developed partnerships with highly reputable global partners like Accenture, Cognizant, Genpact and others with good standards for their employee care. For context, Accenture, Cognizant and all of our partners work on projects for multiple clients simultaneously. Accenture employs over 450,000 people in over 200 cities globally and Cognizant employs over 280,000 people. These partnerships are important because they allow us to work with established companies who have a core competency in this type of work and who are able to help us ramp with location and language support quickly. They have experience managing large workforces; scaling quickly for new issues and risks; and adapting with us as the risks to our community and product needs change over time. And, as our needs evolve and we shift focus from an area where our work has grown more mature to an emerging area, we can work in real-time with Accenture, Cognizant and our other partners to address those needs.

A lot of the recent questions are focused on ensuring the people working in these roles are treated fairly and with respect. We want to continue to hear from our content reviewers, our partners and even the media – who hold us accountable and give us the opportunity to improve. This is such an important issue, and our Global Ops leadership team has focused substantial attention on it and will continue to do so.

However, given the size at which we operate and how quickly we’ve grown over the past couple of years, we will inevitably encounter issues we need to address on an ongoing basis. Today, we already have mechanisms in place with our partners who run these sites to make sure any concerns being reported are the uncommon exception and never the norm. These mechanisms include:

Clear contracts. Our agreements with our partners explicitly require good facilities, wellness breaks for employees, and resiliency support. Regular site visits. Our partner management teams regularly visit our partner sites to observe the workplace, and help address any issues. These visits include 1:1 conversations and focus groups with content reviewers to make sure that our teams can get direct feedback from the people doing this important work. Business reviews. We conduct weekly calls, regular visits, and monthly and quarterly business reviews with our partners to discuss their performance against our expectations; this includes assessing the workplace and how well they’re delivering on wellness and resiliency support.

We’ve done a lot of work in this area and there’s a lot we still need to do. Arun Chandra recently joined us to lead our vendor partner management efforts for Global Operations – including Business Integrity (BI), Product Data Operations (PDO) and Community Operations (CO). He’s focused squarely on the wellness and experience of our vendor partner employees and is driving several initiatives aimed at continuing to improve the support they receive. Some of these key initiatives include:

Partner compliance and audit program. We are putting in place a rigorous and regular compliance and audit process for all of our outsourced partners to ensure they are complying with the contracts and care we expect. This will include even more regular and comprehensive focus groups with vendor employees than we do today. Contract standardization. With the formation of Global Ops last year, we are standardizing all our contracts across CO, BI, and PDO to ensure consistent terms of care and resiliency programming across all areas of business. This will also include an increase in our requirements and expectations that goes beyond our current contracts. Partner summit. In April, Arun and our Global Ops leadership team will bring the leadership of all of our partner sites, across CO, BI, PDO and others, together in Menlo Park for a Facebook Vendor Partner Summit. The purpose of this summit is to bring our partners and their employees closer to our mission and culture. We will reinforce our expectations for our partners, provide in-depth sessions on wellness and resiliency, quality, and training, and address some of the recent concerns and reinforce our standards on wellness and support. Both Facebook and our partners take wellness and support seriously and approach it holistically and proactively. This is just the beginning of our efforts to bring partners together, align on our expectations and build best practices, starting with this summit. Improved partner support and communications. We encourage all partner employees to raise any concerns with their employers’ HR teams. Additionally, they can anonymously raise concerns directly to Facebook via our whistleblower hotline, and Facebook will follow up on the issue appropriately. In addition to our regular touch points already mentioned, we will continue to improve communication channels particularly with sites managed by partners. In addition to understanding partner employee concerns, other key focus areas will be to more seamlessly communicate policy updates and deliver training materials and other resources.

We will regularly evaluate these roles, our needs going forward, the risks, location, mix of the workforce and many more areas.

Put simply, after a couple of years of very rapid growth, we’re now further upgrading our work in this area to continue to operate effectively and improve at this size. Going forward, John, Arun, our Global Ops leadership team and I will continue to share our progress and steps forward on this important topic with you.

By Robert Pepper, Head of Global Connectivity Policy and Planning

Connectivity lets people talk with friends and family, learn new things, start new businesses and find employment. But there are still about 3.8 billion people around the world without fast and reliable internet access. Facebook Connectivity is working with network operators, equipment manufacturers and other partners to develop technologies and introduce new initiatives to change that.

For the past three years, Facebook has commissioned the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) to create a comprehensive Inclusive Internet Index (3i) that assesses a country’s internet inclusion across four categories: availability, affordability, relevance and readiness. This year, the Index was expanded to include 100 countries, representing 94% of the world’s population and 96% of global GDP. In addition, the 3i study is again accompanied by a Value of the Internet Survey, which polled 5,069 respondents from 99 countries to gauge perceptions on how internet use impacts people’s livelihood.

Mixed Progress

Like last year’s index, which concluded that there was cause for optimism but that we were still far from achieving full internet inclusivity, this year’s 3i study shows mixed progress.

This year, the study revealed stalled progress on closing the digital divide. In contrast to previous years, the gap between the lowest income countries and all others grew. Although the overall gap between those with access to the internet and those without narrowed – because of progress on access, quality of coverage, and affordability – the lowest income countries fell behind because they improved at a slower rate than other countries and much slower than last year. Internet connections in low income countries increased by only 0.8% compared to 65.1% last year.

If this stalling of progress is a one year blip, that’s bad enough. If it is the beginning of a trend, that would be an alarming shift that would require greater focus and cooperation among all the players, including the private sector and policymakers. Either way, it reinforces the importance of our work at Facebook to partner with all parts of the technology and mobile ecosystem to increase availability to an affordable internet.

On the positive side, this year’s 3i study found that inclusion for women and those with disabilities has improved, with low-income and lower-middle-income countries driving progress. However, affordability is declining relative to monthly income in many countries, disproportionately affecting women and people in low-income countries, all of whom are more reliant on mobile as their primary means of accessing the internet.

This year’s index and survey found:

Steady overall progress but slow growth of connectivity in low-income countries: While the percentage of households connected to the internet globally increased, on average, from 53.1% to 54.8%, the rate of growth in internet connections slowed to 2.9% in 2019 from 7.7% in 2018. The largest year-over-year increases were in Cameroon (106.7%), Kenya (34.3%) and Kuwait (28.3%). Mobile internet services improved, but many low-income countries are seeing slow progress: In some countries, fixed-line internet access is too expensive or inaccessible — that’s why mobile services are critical. This year’s 3i reveals that, while lower-middle-income countries had a significant 66% improvement in 4G coverage, low-income countries saw a moderate 22% improvement. . Web accessibility standards have improved globally, led by low- and lower-middle-income countries: Accessibility issues prevented many people with disabilities from accessing the internet. However, the accessibility divide, as measured by W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) global standard, has been narrowing. The average web accessibility score improved by 9.7% compared with 2018. In low- and lower-middle-income countries, the score improved by 29.4% and 23.5%, respectively. Low- and lower-middle-income countries narrowed gender gap: Men are more likely to have internet access than women in 84% of the indexed countries. However, in a positive trend in 2018, low- and lower-middle-income countries drove progress to narrow the gender gap. While there remains much to be done, there are demonstrable benefits from comprehensive female e-inclusion policies, digital skills programs, and targets for women and girls to study science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The UK, Namibia, and Ireland, followed by Austria, Chile, and South Africa, are among the top performers of the year, all with female digital skills training plans. Despite privacy concerns, the internet is crucial for employment and improving livelihood: Carrying over from last year’s findings, more than half (52.2%) of respondents say they are not confident about their online privacy. Yet the majority of respondents (74.4%) think the internet has been the most effective tool for finding jobs. Additionally, 60.2% of respondents say the online education platforms and digital education technologies have helped them pursue an education and 76.5% have used the internet to improve their skills in changing labor markets. Entrepreneurs, the under-employed and people in low-income countries are limited by the lack of quality connectivity which will further handicap them.

Because the Value of the Internet Survey found overwhelmingly positive benefits from using the internet, particularly for improving livelihood, implications of the lowest income countries falling behind in terms of connectivity are particularly troubling. The lack of quality connectivity will further handicap low and lower middle-income countries’ ability to improve their economies relative to their neighbors.

Preventing a digital divide and closing the remaining gaps in internet inclusion will require collaboration between governments, the private sector, academics, technologists and civil society. Governments can help on the supply side with policies enabling new technologies, new business models and investment in high quality networks; and on the demand side, by facilitating affordability and helping foster eGov, public health and education applications. With enabling policies in place, the private sector can continue to extend internet infrastructure and explore new technologies and applications that drive demand and give more people access to the benefits of the internet.

No single stakeholder or group can achieve internet inclusion alone. Rather, we all must work together, leveraging our relative strengths and expertise to achieve our goal of bringing more people online.

The full Inclusive Internet Index can be accessed at http://theinclusiveinternet.eiu.com.

You can read more about Facebook’s connectivity efforts and our announcements at Mobile World Congress here.

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By Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy

Earlier this week, we removed 168 Facebook accounts, 28 Pages and eight Instagram accounts for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior targeting people in Moldova. This activity originated in Moldova, and used a combination of fake accounts and some authentic accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing. Given the upcoming elections in Moldova, we wanted to let people know about the action we’ve taken and the facts as we know them today.

The Page admins and account owners typically posted about local news and political issues such as required Russian or English language education and reunification with Romania. They also shared manipulated photos, divisive narratives and satire and impersonated a local fact checking organization’s Page that called out other Pages for spreading fake news. Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our manual review found that some of this activity was linked to employees of the Moldovan government.

Presence on Facebook and Instagram: 168 Facebook accounts, 28 Pages and 8 accounts on Instagram. Followers: About 54,000 accounts followed at least one of these Pages and around 1,300 accounts followed at least one of these Instagram accounts. Advertising: Less than $20,000 in spending for ads on Facebook and Instagram paid for in US dollars, euros and Romanian leu. We have not completed our review of the organic content coming from these accounts.

We identified these accounts through our internal investigation into Moldova-linked coordinated inauthentic behavior. Our investigation benefited from a tip shared by a local civil society organization.

We are constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people. As is always the case with these takedowns, we’re removing these Pages, groups and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they post. In this case, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action.

To ensure that we stay ahead in rooting out abuse we’re investing heavily in building better technology, hiring more people and working more closely with law enforcement, security experts and other technology companies.

Below is a sample of the content posted by some of these Pages.

Caption: Moldovans from Afghanistan – the electoral hostages of notPresident Dodon ????  #VIDEO

Caption: How can you believe in this worthless news which only tell lies?”

Caption: #ParliamentaryElections2019
Image text: I did not decide who to vote for

Caption: The high school principal was NOT beaten up by the PDM representatives! #StopFals

Caption: The ground underneath Moldova will shake with power
Headline: Attention: In Moldova is expected a very powerful earthquake!

Caption: STOP MANIPULATION!
Headline: Conference “Misinformation as a propaganda tool: trends and regional impact”

Caption: Vlad Plahontiuc personally handed the DPM (Democratic Party of Moldova) membership card to Vasile Melinte.
Headline: Vasile Melinte is the Moldovan hero who saved 70 people during the Greek fires, he just joined the DPM!

Caption: The socialist Dinari Cojocaru radically changed his rhetoric just one week later. Did he take money from the Bahamas company or not? What did you understand from this?

 

Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that for his 2019 personal challenge, he’d host a series of discussions about the future of technology in society. Today, he shared the first of these conversations with Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain. They cover information fiduciaries, encryption, decentralized services, governance, fighting misinformation, different business models, privacy innovation and future research areas. You can find the video, transcript and audio file below.

By Paul McDonald, Engineering Director, Location Infrastructure

Android and iOS are by far the two most popular mobile operating systems, but their location settings work differently. Android offers a single on/off switch for Location Services, so you can decide whether to share your precise location with Facebook and other apps. But iOS offers an additional option, so you can share your precise location always, only when the app is in use, or never. As a result, one of the questions we often hear from people using Facebook for Android – but not those using iOS – is whether Facebook gets their location even when they’re not using the app.

Today we’re announcing an update to Facebook’s location controls on Android to give people more choice over how we collect location information and how we store it. We’re not making any changes to the choices you’ve previously made nor are we collecting any new information as a result of this update.

New Location Control and Checkup on Android

Today we’re introducing a new background location control on Facebook for Android so people can choose if they want us to collect location information when they’re not using the app. For example, when people choose to use Nearby Friends, a feature that lets friends share their locations with each other, they give Facebook permission to access their location even when they’re not using the app.

Until today, people using these features were asked to enable Location History. If you enabled this setting, two things happened: you would share your location when you weren’t using the app and you would allow Facebook to store a history of your precise locations. With this update, you’ll have a dedicated way to choose whether or not to share your location when you aren’t using the app.

For people who previously chose to turn their Location History setting “on,” the new background location setting is “on.” For people who had turned Location History “off” – or never turned it on in the first place – the new background location setting is “off.”

We’re alerting everyone using the Facebook app on an Android device who chose to turn on Location History in the past, letting them know about the new control, and asking them to take a moment to check that their settings are right for them. If you’ve never turned on Location History, you don’t have to do anything. We won’t turn either of these settings on unless you specifically tell us to.

New Checkup on iOS

For people who use Facebook for iOS, nothing is changing. But we will send a similar alert to everyone who chose to turn on Location History in the past so they can check to make sure their settings are right for them.

 

More Information About Android and iOS Settings

Today, the Location Services setting that iOS provides gives you three choices for when an app can access your precise location:

Never: Your app can’t access your precise location While Using: Your app can access your precise location while you’re using the app Always: Your app can access your precise location even when you’re not using the app

Today, Android’s Location Services setting gives you two choices on whether an app can access your precise location:

Off: Your app can’t access your precise location On: Your app can access your precise location at any time

About Facebook and Location

Location information makes it possible for people to use Facebook to plan events, see more relevant ads, mark themselves safe in a crisis and share their favorite places. It also helps us recognize if your account has been compromised. For instance, if you usually log in to your account from a browser in London but suddenly someone tries to log in from a browser in Sydney, our systems recognize this unusual behavior and send you an alert to check that it’s really you. You can learn more about the types of location information we collect – in addition to the precise location information that Android and iOS settings control – in Privacy Basics.

We’re also updating Access Your Information to include our estimate of your primary location at the city or postal code level. Primary location is determined by information we use to support Facebook Products, such as the current city you might have entered on your profile; the IP address of your device; your activity on Facebook Products (like check ins); and precise location information if you’ve chosen to share it.

We hope people find these updates helpful and we’ll continue finding ways to improve our controls based on feedback.

By Akua Gyekye, Public Policy Manager, Africa Elections

With a number of upcoming elections across Africa, we want to share an update on our work to reduce the spread of misinformation, protect election integrity and support civic engagement across the continent. We’ve dedicated unprecedented resources to these efforts globally — and our work across Africa is focused in eight key areas.

Fighting False News

We want to stop the spread of false news on our platforms. That’s why we’ve teamed up with local third-party fact-checkers across South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon and Senegal — including Africa Check (Africa’s first independent fact-checking organization), AFP (Agence France-Presse – an international news agency), Pesa Check (a local Kenyan fact-checking organization) and Dubawa (a local Nigerian fact-checking organization). These independent groups help us assess the accuracy of news shared on Facebook, and when they determine content is false, we reduce its distribution in News Feed so fewer people see it. We also show related articles from fact-checkers for more context and notify users if a story they have shared is rated as false. Additionally, in Nigeria, WhatsApp has worked with Africa Check and CrossCheck Nigeria to let users send questions about potential rumors they have received through the platform. These fact-checking expansions are part of a broader strategy to fight fake news that includes extensive work to remove fake accounts; cut off incentives to the financially-motivated actors that spread misinformation; promote news literacy; and give more context so people can decide for themselves what to read, trust, and share.

Boosting Digital Literacy and Helping People Spot False News

We want to make sure people can spot false news and know how to flag it. That’s why we’ve rolled out educational tips on national and regional radio and in print media across Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia, Kenya and Zimbabwe. In Nigeria, WhatsApp has launched its “Share Facts, Not Rumours” campaign to help increase awareness about hoaxes. Additionally, at the end of last year Facebook began a new Online Safety Programme for students in Nigerian secondary schools. The 12-week workshop is designed to help teenagers understand the fundamentals of online safety and digital literacy, covering topics such as managing an online presence; social media and sharing; public Wi-Fi safety; building healthy relationships online; understanding password security and privacy settings; and identifying misinformation online.

Promoting Civic Engagement

Helping to build informed and civically engaged communities is central to our work around elections. In Nigeria, we’ve rolled out new options in English & Hausa so people can report posts that contain incorrect election information, encourage violence or otherwise violate our Community Standards. On Election Day, we’ll show a voting day reminder in English and Hausa at the top of Facebook’s News Feed.

Making Political Ads More Transparent

Earlier this month, we began temporarily expanding enforcement and not accepting foreign election ads on Facebook in Nigeria to help prevent foreign interference. Already today you can see any ad that a Page is running on Facebook, regardless if it’s shown to you.

Journalist Trainings

We continue to educate media groups and journalists across the country on best practices for sharing content on our platforms and online safety. We also provide trainings on our Community Standards, which govern what is and is not allowed on our platform.

Proactive Removal of Impersonation Accounts

We’ve always had policies against impersonation. Thanks to recent advancements in our detection technology, we’ve become much more effective at identifying these accounts.

Partnerships with NGOs and Civil Society

In order to better understand local issues and how we can tackle them more effectively, we work with a number of NGO and civil society partners across many African countries. These local partners have been instrumental in giving us feedback that we’ve incorporated into our policies and programs, including the aforementioned trainings with teens and journalists.

Connecting with Political Parties About Security

We’ve trained parties, campaigns and candidates on security best practices, including how to turn on two-factor authentication and how to avoid common threats online. For the Nigerian elections, we’ve trained vice presidential candidates, senatorial candidates and top advisors from over 35 major political parties — and the information included in these trainings is all available for anyone to access at politics.fb.com.

We want Facebook and WhatsApp to be places where people feel safe, can access accurate information and make their voices heard. We are making significant investments, both in products and in people, and continue to improve in each of these areas.

  1. Why We Build: People Who Bring the World Closer Together
  2. Partnering with Experts to Protect People from Self-Harm and Suicide
  3. Why We Disagree With the Bundeskartellamt
  4. No, Your News Feed Is Not Limited to Posts From 26 Friends

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