MANILA, Philippines (Updated 6:15 p.m.) — No fact-checkers or company officials were involved in the flagging of Facebook posts by state media, the company that owns social networking platform Facebook said, adding that the content affected had not been previously flagged by any third-party fact-checking partners.
The statement came after Philippine News Agency, the National Press Club and the administration PDP-Laban party raised concerns of censorship on the social media platform.
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"We are aware that some links to the PNA and Radyo Pilipinas websites appear to be blocked from being shared on our apps, by an automation system," a Meta spokesperson told Philstar.com in response to emailed questions.
"As a result, other Facebook Pages that have previously shared these links, would see their posts flagged as well. We are investigating and working to resolve this issue."
PNA said in a Facebook post on Sunday that links to PNA and Radyo Pilipinas were also being flagged. The social media company previously flagged a post by National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr.'s claiming supposed communist infiltration of Congress.
In a post on Monday, Meta clarified that its third-party fact-checking partners "do not remove content, accounts or Pages from our apps."
"We remove content when it violates our Community Standards, which are separate from our fact-checking programs," it also said.
It added when a fact-checker rates a content as false, "we significantly reduce that content’s distribution so that fewer people see it, apply warnings, and misinformation labels to notify people who try to share it." Pages, groups, accounts and wesbites that repeatedly share false or misleading content may have their "overall distribution" reduced.
Community standards
Government agencies, including the Department of the Interior and Local Government lashed out at the company, describing it as a “dystopic Big Brother" in separate statements. DILG spokesperson Jonathan Malaya blamed the website's third-party fact-check partners, calling them "biased...for their imprudence and audacity."
National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict spokesperson Lorraine Badoy said that "abusive fact-checkers" were behind the "attack against the freedom of expression."
Under the social networking giant's community rules, pages and domains that repeatedly share false information will also see their distribution reduced and their ability to monetize and advertise removed.
In early April, Facebook flagged two pages with millions of followers on the platform that were found to violate some of its community standards. The company has said that it flags content related to the following:
- Violence and criminal behavior: Violence and incitement, dangerous individuals and organizations, coordinating harm and promoting crime, restricted goods and services, fraud and deception
- Threats to safety: Suicide and self-injury, child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity; adult sexual exploitation, bullying and harassment, human exploitation, privacy violations
- Objectionable content: Hate speech, violent and graphic content, adult nudity and sexual activity, sexual solicitation
- Threats to integrity and authenticity: Account integrity and authentic identity, spam, cybersecurity, inauthentic behavior, misinformation, memorialization
- Threats to respecting intellectual property: Intellectual property
- Content-related requests and decisions: User requests, additional protection of minors
Badoy claimed the community standards were "faulty."
“This is the height of arrogance and stupidity on the part of those who are responsible for establishing the faulty community standards. Rest assured, your actions shall not be tolerated and shall not go unpunished,” she said in a statement.
“If it will be proven after the conduct of an investigation that your actions (under the guise of fact-checking based not on facts but on something else as dictated by your principals) have resulted in hampering, preventing, hindering, obstructing, demeaning, vilifying, and undermining legitimate government efforts, programs, projects, and fact-based accomplishments by government agencies, proper actions will be undertaken against you and possible sanctions may be meted out on you,” she added.
To recall, Esperon claimed without basis that members of the Communist Party of the Philippines have infiltrated Congress through the party-list system. The practice of red-tagging has been flagged by the Commission on Human Rights and United Nations as dangerous.
Badoy, too, has found herself on the receiving end of administrative complaints over her red-tagging of activists, journalists, lawmakers, and even Vice President Leni Robredo in recent days.
This isn't the first time Meta clashed with the Philippine government's social media properties. In September 2020, the company took down two networks of accounts over "coordinated inauthentic behavior." The company added its investigation found "links to Philippine military and Philippine police."
Facebook said the operation had about 133,000 accounts following its pages, 61,000 people who joined one or more of its Groups and around 150 accounts that followed one or more of its Instagram accounts.