- An Ounce of Discretion Is Worth a Ton of Privacy Settings
- Friend Management: The Key to Choosing Your Audience
- Controlling Who Sees What
- Keeping Applications in Line
- Facebook Security 101
- Reporting Abuse
- Phishing
- Beware of Links Bearing Trojans
- If You're Under 18
- Keeping a Low Profile
- Quitting Facebook
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Reporting Abuse
If you see hateful, abusive, or otherwise objectionable content that violates Facebook’s Terms of Use, you can report it anonymously to Facebook.
What’s “Objectionable”?
Obviously, deciding what’s objectionable can be subjective, but Facebook’s terms of use expressly prohibit nudity, pornography, harassment, and unwelcome contact. Objectionable content, according to Facebook, includes “content that we deem to be harmful, threatening, unlawful, defamatory, infringing, abusive, inflammatory, harassing, vulgar, obscene, fraudulent, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable.” In other words, the definition of objectionable is ultimately up to Facebook’s judgment.
You can also anonymously report individuals who post offensive content, or who harass or threaten you or any other Facebook users.
Facebook will investigate, and if the complaint is legitimate, Facebook will take the appropriate steps to warn or remove the parties responsible.
If you spot a profile with objectionable content, you can click the Report This Person link toward the bottom of the profile to send a report to Facebook. (Note that you won’t see this link if you’re friends with the person in question. If you’re actually going to report on a friend, you’d probably want to defriend that person first anyway.)
Facebook Groups have a similar link (Report Group) on their pages that you can use to report objectionable Groups, and so do Photos and Notes. You can report individual Wall posts and other messages using the Report link underneath each posting.
Finally, if you can’t find a Report link, you can always send an e-mail message to abuse@facebook.com to notify Facebook of objectionable content or behavior. You can even report objectionable ads to Facebook, if you see any, by e-mailing advertise@facebook.com. Facebook says it will “use [its] best efforts” to remove ads that violate its terms of use.