Meta’s Oversight Board overturned management decision 14 times
Many have been frustrated by Meta’s -earlier Facebook- management’s power to decide what can be said and what can’t. Meta’s Oversight Board has published its first annual report showing that the board issued decisions on 20 significant cases last year and that the board overturned Meta’s decisions 14 times. The board has an independent position and comprises, academics, politicians and journalists etc.
The board says that there was clearly enormous pent-up demand among Facebook and Instagram users for some way to appeal Meta’s content moderation decisions to an organization independent from the company. The board got more than a million appeals trough December last year. More than 8 in 10 appeals to restore content to Facebook or Instagram concerning posts which supposedly violated Meta’s rules on bullying, hate speech, or violence and incitement.
“We took a human rights-based approach to analyzing content moderation decisions and received nearly 10,000 public comments that helped to shape our first judgments. We also asked Meta more than 300 questions as part of our first 20 cases, opening a transparent space for dialogue with the company which did not exist before. In many more cases, the board’s work resulted in a voluntary decision by the company to reverse wrongful content moderation decisions.”
“We also made 86 recommendations to Meta in 2021 that pushed the company to be more transparent about its policies. Meta’s responses to our case decisions and policy recommendations are starting to improve how it treats users:”
- Meta now gives people using Facebook in English who break its rules on hate speech more detail on what they’ve done wrong.
- The company is rolling out new messaging in certain locations telling people whether automation or human review resulted in their content being removed, and has committed to provide new information on government requests and its newsworthiness allowance in its transparency reporting.
- Meta translated Facebook’s Community Standards into Punjabi and Urdu, and committed to translate the platform’s rules into Marathi, Telugu, Tamil and Gujarati. Once completed, more than 400 million more people will be able to read Facebook’s rules in their native language.
The board says that while Meta committed to implement most of the recommendations made in 2021, the next task is to ensure that the company turns its promises into actions that will improve the experience of people using Facebook and Instagram.
The board says it is in dialogue with Meta about expanding the board’s scope, including to review user appeals of its decisions in areas like groups and accounts.
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