"A Closer Look: Meta’s First Annual Human Rights Report", 14 July 2022

Inside the Report

This report provides more details about our entire approach to managing human rights risks. While some areas of the report have been previously disclosed, many are new, such as the due diligence we performed in regard to COVID-19 and Ray-Ban Stories. 

The report’s structure follows the pillars of the Human Rights Policy. ... this report will serve as a regular annual disclosure on how we are addressing our human rights impacts that people can expect to see on a regular basis.

It includes details about how we’ve updated our policies as part of an ongoing effort to take human rights considerations into account in an increasingly dynamic world, including:

• specifically referencing human rights principles;
• clarifying our health misinformation policies;
• enhancing our bullying and harassment policy to create stronger protections against gender-based harassment for everyone, including public figures;
• prohibiting certain mass harassment or brigading; 
• expanding our policies that prohibit veiled and implicit threats, and more. 

The report explains how our Data Policy, our Law Enforcement Response Team and our due diligence assessments work together to protect people from unlawful or overbroad government surveillance. It highlights the important role that end-to-end encryption plays ... and how we’re expanding it to our other messaging apps. We show how we manage risks related to human trafficking and exploitation through in-product features that raise awareness... We also note how our Community Standards and Community Guidelines address hate speech, how our advertising policies address non-discrimination, and how our dedicated Civil Rights and Human Rights teams worked across the company during the reporting period to help ensure responsible innovation and accessibility. 

Finally, the report discusses our work to increase teen safety on Instagram, our continuing work to fight child exploitation on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram and the significant investments we’ve made in teams and technologies to better protect free and fair elections, including dedicated teams focused on election integrity and products that bring people relevant and reliable voting information.