Keeping Our Reviews Authentic and Trustworthy

As more people and businesses rely on valuable feedback from customers—such as ratings, reviews, recommendations and questions & answers—we’re dedicated to keeping that information relevant and authentic. Today, we’re launching a new Community Feedback Policy in the U.S. to clearly share what we allow and prohibit within customer feedback.

The new policy was created to ensure that reviews are based on real purchasing experiences, and to keep irrelevant, fraudulent and offensive feedback off of our platforms.

More than 200 million businesses connect with their customers through our apps and technologies. Community feedback provides businesses with helpful insights from their customers and helps people make trusted purchasing decisions as they discover new products.

About our new Community Feedback Policy

The Community Standards that govern what content is and isn’t allowed on our platforms were created based on feedback from people who use our products and the advice of technology and public safety experts. In addition to our Community Standards, we also have policies for businesses on Meta, including our advertising and commerce policies, which may be stricter than our Community Standards.

Building on these, we’ve created specific policies for community feedback to provide clearer guidelines on what types of feedback are allowed on Meta products. We have always taken action against irrelevant community feedback, manipulated reviews and other Community Feedback Policy violations, but are now establishing policies to provide clearer guidelines on what types of community feedback are allowed.

In addition to complying with our Community Standards, all feedback people leave about products and businesses must now comply with our Community Feedback Policy, which specifically prohibits manipulation of reviews, incentivization, irrelevance, graphic content and spam.

Our approach to enforcement

Similar to how we enforce our advertising and commerce policies, we rely on automated technology and human reviewers to help ensure all feedback is compliant with our policies before being published. If the person who left feedback feels that Meta’s decision to remove it was incorrect, they can request another review.

Our Community Feedback Policy is intended to provide equal voice for all viewpoints that comply with Meta policies, including the full range of positive, negative and neutral feedback. As such, we treat all positive and negative feedback equally. We do not subject negative feedback to greater scrutiny when reviewed for policy violations nor do we alter feedback in any way before publishing.

When we launch a new policy, it can take time for the various parts of our enforcement mechanisms to learn how to correctly and consistently enforce the new standard. But as we gather new data, our machine learning models, automated technology and human reviewers will improve in their ability to ensure our Community Feedback tools—especially reviews—maintain their integrity, relevance and authenticity.

Our commitment to addressing future challenges

We will continue to improve our detection and enforcement to identify policy violations, but if a person or business sees a suspicious review, we encourage them to report it. People can report a suspicious review on Facebook by clicking the three dots in the upper-right hand corner or on Instagram by holding down or swiping left on the review.

A business can also report a violating review in Commerce Manager. Once reported, the review is shared with our internal review teams for further investigation. If the review violates our policies, it is removed. This work protects businesses from fraud and abuse, and provides people with more transparency and trustworthy product reviews.

We create and update all of our policies in line with the industry and technology as it evolves and we design our policies to keep misleading, false and abusive content off our platforms. While we know our work is never done, we are committed to making our technologies a trusted place for our community.