Facebook announces new censorship for Groups

Facebook seems to be attempting to respond to the most recent round of criticism against it and deflect from it by “doing more” with an announcement that new censorship measures are on its way.

This time they concern groups, whose members’ posts will be demoted if Facebook determines that they had violated its guidelines in other places on the giant network – meaning that their group-posted content can still be in line with Facebook’s rules, without having broken any. The downranking will apply to all content posted by these users in a group.

The intent is to isolate group members from their peers in the same community for what Facebook determines were transgressions committed elsewhere. By isolating group members in this way, visibility and therefore communication would be reduced inside groups, especially those Facebook or its critics and entities exerting pressure on it disapprove of – since such users’ content would already have been penalized elsewhere on the network.