If Facebook were a country, its population of 500 million would make it one of the world’s giants – in the real world, only China and India have bigger populations. Of course, part of the job of any country is to keep its citizens safe.
Read more
This evening Facebook sent out a press release announcing the formation of the “Facebook Safety Advisory Board, a group of five leading Internet safety organizations from North America and Europe that will serve in a consultative capacity to the company on issues related to online safety.” The goal is to proactively work together with existing online safety organizations to protect users. For those familiar with the traditionally reactive position that most social networks take, this is an unprecedented action by Facebook.
Read more
Facebook has agreed to a test with the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office in which over “1.5 million randomly-selected page impressions over the next six months” will view a larger abuse report link. I have yet to find an icon for this link but it’s clear that Facebook is willing to cooperate with officials to ensure that Facebook provides a safe environment for younger users.
The link will be used to report offensive content on the site. So how much is 1.5 million impressions in the grand scheme of things? Not much. According to comscore Facebook served 3.65 billion ad views in June making this less than .04 percent of all impressions. So the odds of you seeing one of these links is extremely low. We would also expect many of these impressions to take place specifically in New Jersey.
As the A.P. news points out, in May, “Facebook agreed to add 40 new safeguards to protect users from cyberbullies and sexual predators following talks with 49 state attorneys general.” This appears to be one of those safeguards.
Update
It appears that the icon being used is the “Report Abuse” icon described on the state of New Jersey’s website.
