Since Facebook, a social media platform with around 1.7 billion worldwide users, has come under fire due to how it dealt with its role as a "media" platform, it has tried launching various ways for its users to manage their respective online experience.
As of late, Facebook unveiled its redesigned Safety Center aimed at helping users regulate their own privacy controls and translated to 50 different languages. Furthermore, the company has added more than 60 partners for its revised Bullying Prevention Hub in order to make its tools more accessible to the public.
The partners include Family Online Safety Institute, Childnet International, and an online forum for teenagers and their parents, called Connect Safely. The revamped Safety Center came a week after news broke that Twitter, another major social media network, lost two of its acquisition deals due to its inability to handle trolls and pestering on its platform.
Facebook's Safety Center has been present since 2010 and its Bullying Prevention Hub was established since 2013. Both sections received periodic updates, sometimes to respond to specific questions regarding cyber bullying.
What Comes With The Update
For starters, the company made its tools more widespread for its global audience.
Head of Global Safety at Facebook, Antigone Davis, wrote that the latest version is now mobile-friendly. This transition makes a lot of sense taking into account that mobile is the main medium used in many countries to access the social media site. Apart from being available in 50 languages, Facebook added more videos to reveal how to utilize the safety controls Facebook has.
Meanwhile, the Bullying Prevention Hub, which was developed together with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, was made public in 2013. Now, the hub's latest version has not been loaded with too many new features. But this revamp indicates that Facebook will be working with more than 60 organizations in order to further its existence and to utilize it more in situations where needed.
The fact that Facebook has been making it possible for people to set their status updates to be visible to specific groups or people could mean a lot to many users.
"For Facebook, making the world more open and connected, [and] giving people the power to share some of their most important moments, means keeping people and their information safe," Davis stated.
Five Critical Areas Of The Update
In line with the update, here are five areas Facebook wants its users to be more aware of how they set their privacy controls.
1. It recommends users to report, via the link on each post, every single time they spot an abusive or offensive content.
2. It recommends that every user should make use of Facebook's two-step verification feature. This allows users to verify their identity via a code sent to their phone every time they log in from an unregistered new device.
3. It recommends that users personalize their content better to target either friends, work colleagues, or the general public, whichever they deemed necessary.
4. It recommends users to control who they tag in their posts and customize their timelines accordingly.
5. The security and privacy checkups will take users through the process of setting all of the abovementioned areas.
Photo: Wen Tong Neo | Flickr
