By The Book

Facebook Reveals Secret Rulebook for Deleting Posts and Accounts

Includes rules on posting about drugs, violence, and cannibalism.

Facebook has released its detailed rulebook for the types of posts and accounts it allows, giving a far greater insight into how it decides what kind of content should be removed from the social-media platform. The rules—far more detailed than the “community standards” that were previously available—set out what kind of posts are permitted on subjects ranging from drug use and sex work to bullying, hate speech, and inciting violence. “You should, when you come to Facebook, understand where we draw these lines and what’s OK and what’s not OK,” said Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of product policy and counterterrorism. The document, which is 8,000 words long, includes guidelines such as avoiding posts that “admit to personal use of non-medical drugs,” prohibiting content that comes from a hacked source “except in limited cases of newsworthiness,” and outlawing videos of people wounded by cannibalism unless they are “in a medical setting.”