Now Facebook can more easily delete your trash Pages

Facebook is sick and tired of your trash content, and by golly it’s finally going to do something about it. 

In a Jan. 23 blog post, the Mark Zuckerberg-helmed advertising giant announced two upcoming changes to the service that we all know and love. First, starting on Jan. 24, Page managers will have access to a new tab that shows which of their content has been removed or demoted by Facebook. Second, and much more interestingly, over the coming weeks Facebook intends to lower the threshold for preemptively booting your garbage off its platform. 

In a touching bit of transparency, the company explained that it is no longer necessarily going to wait for Pages and Groups to violate its community standards before removing them from the Facebookverse. Instead, the company is moving toward a much more, shall we say, proactive approach to identifying what can and cannot stay on its servers. 

“[When] we remove a Page or group for violating our policies, we may now also remove other Pages and Groups even if that specific Page or Group has not met the threshold to be unpublished on its own,” explains the blog post. “To enforce this updated policy, we’ll look at a broad set of information, including whether the Page has the same people administering it [as a previously removed Page], or has a similar name, to one we’re removing.”

In other words, if Facebook sees Trash Page X violating its community standards and decides to remove it, it may go ahead and pull some other similarly named Pages down as well — even if they’re not in violation of any specific policy.

We reached out to Facebook to confirm that this means that Pages run by completely separate individuals could be pulled offline because someone else’s Page violated the company’s community standards, but received no response to that specific question as of press time. 

As the new policy reads, it looks like Facebook is sick of having to point to specific community standards violations every time it removes a Group or Page from its platform. This new approach allows the company a bit more discretion when it comes to banishing content.