What Happens After you Click the Report Button – Now You’ll Know!
Facebook announced today the launch and initial testing of their brand new Support Dashboard, a system that gives a Facebook user insight into what happens behind the scenes after they report a photo or timeline.
This is what the new Support Dashboard will look like once it hits your account
Anyone who has ever tried to receive a response from Facebook will inevitably conclude that it is often a fruitless exercise. “Customer service” and “Facebook” rarely get uttered within the same breath, at least never in a positive way. However Facebook seem to be taking some positive steps when it comes to providing its customers with some actual feedback. And they have started with an aspect of their service that is constantly under scrutiny – from us and many others – their reporting feature.
Over the years when a Facebook user believes a photo or other content on the social networking site should be removed they would click the Report option and select the appropriate reason for reporting. From there the process has always continued behind closed curtains, with the Facebook user placing their blind faith that Facebook would actually deal with the issue appropriately.
That’s all to change with the launch of the Support Dashboard (announced on their Facebook Safety page) which details the stage of every report a Facebook user submits, from when the report is received to the action (or lack of) taken because of the report. Users also have the option under the “Learn More” option to be taken straight to the applicable section of the Facebook community guidelines specific to the report so they can see why their report was “actioned” upon or rejected.
Facebook are constantly under scrutiny for their reporting features.
It certainly seems to be a step in the right direction for Facebook who have been constantly (yet justly) slated for their by-far inadequate reporting feature. This new transparency will add accountability to their reporting feature. Facebook will not be able to ignore reports and incorrect decisions will be made public. We would also expect that Facebook will be pressuring themselves more than ever with the Support Dashboard to deal with reports in a more timely fashion as opposed to taking weeks to do anything which we have seen many times before.
We also imagine a driving factor in the decision to launch this service is to make Facebook’s users more aware of the community guidelines which decree what Facebook will and will not remove, in an effort to prevent their users from continually reporting photos that do not violate Facebook’s terms and thus will not be removed.
We applaud this step made by Facebook but there is a long way to go before their reporting features are by any means satisfactory. A step to make the reporting feature more transparent is great but one of the prolific gripes is why Facebook leaves so much disturbing content online and for so long, and why doesn’t Facebook do more to pre-emptively remove violating content such as placing filters on the site to detect and remove offending material automatically instead of relying on user reports to clean up their site. Essentially why be reactive when you can be proactive? Check our upcoming blog post where we revisit the sick baby hoaxes.
In the meantime the Support Dashboard is being released today but only gradually so you may not see it for a few weeks. We encourage all of our followers to use it and make sure it all works correctly and that your reports are being listened to. Let us know your thoughts on this new feature.
