What’s This About “Community Standards?”

Jack R. Noel
February 8, 2023

What are the Facebook “community standards” which are enforced so ferociously and so irrationally?

From the Wikipedia page on Normativity:
In standards terminology still used by some organizations, “normative” means “considered to be a prescriptive part of the standard”.
It characterizes that part of the standard which describes what ought (see philosophy above) to be done within the application of that standard. It is implicit that application of that standard will result in a valuable outcome.

For example, many standards have an introduction, preface, or summary that is considered non-normative, as well as a main body that is considered normative. “Compliance” is defined as “complies with the normative sections of the standard”

So we get from this that Facebook has developed a set of “principles” and we know also that those Facebook principles include the idea of “non violence” as something that ought to be. Facebook’s community standards are therefore used (they believe) to ensure no one “promotes” the use of violence. But in practice violence is a human characteristic, empirically confirmed by wars and crimes of violence and even violence used in self defense. Here’s where two things…