Facebook announces new measures to keep groups safe

Facebook is once again introducing new measures with the aim of protecting its users - in this specific case, groups on the social network. The company already takes action on groups that violate its rules, but it's now expanding the set of actions it can take to ensure groups are a safe place for its users.

For starters, after initially halting recommendations for groups associated with political and civic movements in the United States, Facebook is expanding that policy to other countries. Additionally, the way recommendations work is getting more nuanced for groups that violate Facebook's rules. They'll initially start showing up lower in the list of recommendations, and their reach will be more restricted as more violations pile up. Eventually, groups may be removed altogether, and the middle steps may also be skipped if the group is believed to be causing severe harm.

Aside from recommendations, Facebook will also try to demote groups that violate its rules in a number of ways. When a user attempts to join, Facebook will warn them that the group in question has allowed posts that violate the community rules, and invited to join those groups will also be limited. For users that are already part of said group, content from the group will also de-prioritized so they show up lower in the user's News Feed.

On top of that, if a group is found to be allowing multiple violations of Facebook's policies, administrators and moderators will be forced to manually approve every post, at least temporarily.

Going further, Facebook is also imposing restrictions on members with repeated violations in groups. Users will be temporarily blocked from posting or commenting on any group - even if they didn't violate the policies in all of them - and they also won't be able to invite people to groups or create new groups.

All of these measures should already be a significant help in slowing the spread potentially harmful content, but Facebook says it's always working to improve its platform. Just yesterday, the company also announced a handful of measures it's taking to protect children on Instagram.