Facebook has today announced that it is enforcing stricter rules governing Group conversations. To start, the company is expanding its restrictions around civic and political groups globally by removing them from recommendations. However, users will still be able to search those groups and invite others to join despite their absence from the recommendations.
“As we work to make sure that potentially harmful groups aren’t recommended to people, we try to be careful not to penalize high-quality groups on similar topics.”
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| For groups that violate guidelines | For members that break rules |
| 1. Facebook will alert people before they join a group that has violated community standards. |
1. Members that have been booked for violating policies multiple times will no longer be able to share new content or comment on existing posts. |
| 2. Invite notifications for such groups will be limited. |
2. They won’t be able to post or comment in ANY group whatsoever. |
| 3. Content from these groups will appear lower in the News Feed |
3. They will no longer be able to invite others to join a group. |
| 4. Admins and moderators will be temporarily required to approve all content if a group has a large number of members booked for violating guidelines. So, unless the content is approved, it won’t be visible to other members. |
4. They can no longer create a new group. |
| 5. If the admin and moderators keep allowing such content, the group will be removed. |
Talking about violating guidelines, groups that start breaking rules will first be downranked in the recommendations so that it becomes more difficult to discover them. And once such incidents are reported, Facebook will also start reducing the privilege of members by imposing certain restrictions that might eventually culminate in outright expulsion of miscreants and the groups as a whole too.
