Good news for photographers that often find themselves on the receiving end of the banhammer from Facebook.
The world’s largest social media platform announced plans for an appeals process for banned content and briefly outlined the guidelines for content submissions in a release to the press.
This is probably part of Facebook’s campaign to make itself more transparent in its processes, especially since consumers expressed distrust in the service after the revelation that some data firms harvested user information with the company’s knowledge.
One area that frustrated many photographers in the past was Facebook’s policies regarding nudity. Now the service has made it clear what is and is not acceptable in that area and they’re still somewhat stringent.
For example, the “Free the Nipple” campaign can post pictures of breasts but in another context Facebook may ban the picture. Other reasons for removing content include violence, hate speech, and infringing copyright.
One area where Facebook lagged to the detriment of creators is its copyright infringement process. This actually results in revenue loss and the social media platform really gave photographers and other creatives very little recourse if someone stole their work on the platform. That’s changing, and hopefully for the better.
Already fairly robust in its ability to detect copyrighted music in videos uploaded to the service, Facebook is now expanding this kind of technology to other areas in an effort combat piracy and lure in more talent as it vies with YouTube and other platforms for currency in new media.
YouTube, for its part, is aggressively pursuing copyright violations and even policing its content in the wake of the increased scrutiny from governments around the world for the type of content it peddles to its users.
As anyone who has had their work banned by any of these services will tell you, having a little more information on the process is a great thing because it was a tough road to go if your content was banned in the past.
Ultimately, the success of these changes rests with the algorithm.
