(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Meta announced that it will limit certain features on Facebook and Instagram to “protect” users amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas.
Among the “temporary” changes were the limitation of comments on new posts from users in the affected region to friends and close followers, and making it easier to delete comments en masse, the Post Millennial reported.
“After the terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel last week, and Israel’s response in Gaza, our teams introduced a series of measures to address the spike in harmful and potentially harmful content spreading on our platforms. Our policies are designed to keep people safe on our apps while giving everyone a voice,” Meta said in its Oct. 18, 2023, news release.
While the policies are applied equally all over the globe, content that contains “praise for Hamas” or “violent and graphic content” will not be tolerated, the Big Tech giant added.
The new policies that were adopted “as a temporary measure to protect people in the region from potentially unwelcome or unwanted comments” were also highlighted in the news release.
The new rules changed the default setting for who can comment on new posts for accounts in the conflict region to “Friends and/or established followers only,” and the feature that displays one or two comments below a post in the news feed has also been disabled, the news source wrote. After Meta made the changes, users were able to more easily “bulk delete comments.”
In addition to that, a “Lock Your Profile” tool was released to allow users to prevent others from viewing their photos and information with the click of a button.
Meta also said in its Oct. 13, 2023, news release that it was taking “stronger steps to avoid recommending potentially violating and borderline violating content,” including blocking certain hashtags.
