14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook quietly rolled out a change to one of its internal policies and user reporting features, more precisely the Inmate Account Takedown Request, now renamed to "Report an Inmate's Account."
EFF's Dave Maass paints a bleak picture in his latest investigation, showing how for years Facebook has been allowing prison administration to take down the inmate accounts just for being incarcerated.
Just fill in a form and you're done!
For a long time, the social network has been providing a simplistic form which law enforcement and prison staff could quickly fill in and a Facebook employee would go over it and suspend the inmate's account.
This would happen even if that prisoner wasn't making threats towards outside persons, breaking Facebook's ToS in any way, or even misbehaving in prison.
The form consisted of only seven fields and was so generic that it didn't include a section for justifying why Facebook was supposed to take down the inmate's account.
Just to get a clue of its simplicity, the original form fields were: Your full name, Your law enforcement agency, Link to the account you'd like to report, Full name of the person you'd like to report, Reason this person is incarcerated, Additional info, Your official law enforcement email address.
According to EFF's investigation, outside two states (California and South Carolina ), there are no statistics on the number of Facebook accounts suspended by law enforcement agencies, and statistics weren't provided by Facebook either, but that's understandable since it all looks like the company was playing the role of 1984's Big Brother.
Facebook changes direction with new inmate reporting procedure
This changed March this year, after EFF's constant prodding and a Care2 petition signed by over 28,000 people made the social network rethink its strategy regarding the civil rights of prison inmates.
Since there's no law forbidding social media access while in prison, the company opted to make some policy changes to its inmate takedown forms, adding a few extra fields and revamping the entire form (you can view the new version below this article).
The major changes are that from now prison officials have to provide official documentation regarding the inmate's offense, along with links to the applicable law in each takedown request.
If there's no applicable law or state policy on social media access, other reasons like safety risks or witness intimidation can be specified if needed.
Although the changes are quite welcomed, we still harbor some curiosity towards the real number of Facebook accounts suspended in the past, and most importantly, what were the most common reasons for doing so.
