According to an internal Facebook document reviewed by The Information , the platform largely puts limits on how often users can apply specific tags to posts. In the document, Facebook tested different settings for posting to specific tags, determined by the geographical location.
“Citizens of countries represented by zeroes are allowed to tag Posts that are visible only in that country, whereas citizens of countries represented by a bunch of zeroes are only permitted to tag Posts that are visible in their respective countries.”
— “Shorter frequentity settings for Tags”
Facebook says that the details in the leaked documents are “accurate” and reflect how the platforms operates, but noted that it considers every tag to be equally important and is “committed to ensuring that everyone can easily find, access and celebrate all the experiences shared on Facebook.”
Facebook’s data scientists do all the manual moderation by applying this system manually, and then compare those early results to a dataset of content shared in that particular country to see how well the system did, the company said.
The data is extremely limited, though, as only around 20% of the content shared on Facebook in the country is tagged with a country.
Those users that are tagged in a post are able to share their tag as well. The company does, however, suggest that users moderate their posts to avoid tagged posts from being visible to others.