April 23 (UPI) — Meta’s Oversight Board published nearly a dozen decisions Wednesday on whether or not to remove content from the company’s platforms.
Meta, the operator of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp, changed in January how it decides what sort of posts can stand. Instead of its former third-party fact-checker method, it now employs Community Notes, which allow users to decide collectively what is too offensive, what is acceptable and what needs to be better explained.
The decisions then go to the Oversight Board, which ultimately decides if Meta’s decision to pull or stand by content is in line with its content policies, and furthermore, if Meta’s policies don’t meet its own standards in regard to freedom of expression.
Two of the decisions refered to Facebook posts that included videos in which a transgender woman is confronted for using the women’s bathroom and another that features a trans athlete who wins a track race. The Board has upheld Meta’s decision to leave up this content because it found “there was not enough of a link between restricting these posts and preventing harm to transgender people,” and it didn’t find the posts to “represent bullying or harassment.”
The board also allowed two Facebook posts that feature the flag flown by South Africa during its apartheid era. In these cases, while Board Members acknowledge the long-term consequences and legacy of apartheid on South Africa,” it deemed that “these two posts do not clearly advocate for exclusion or segregation, nor can they be understood as a call for people to engage in violence or discrimination.”
However, the board did agree that Facebook must remove two posts that violate Meta’s “Hateful Conduct” policy. The posts in question were “by a Polish political party,” who used “racist terminology to harness anti-migrant sentiment,” and the other “generalizes immigrants as gang rapists, a claim that, when repeated, whips up fear and hatred.”
The board also overturned Facebook’s decision to leave up three posts that were shared during riots in Britain in 2024, as it felt “each created the risk of likely and imminent harm” and were “posted during a period of contagious anger and growing violence, fueled by misinformation and disinformation on social media.”
A video posted to Instagram that featured a “drag performance and a caption that included a word designated by Meta as a slur” had been taken down, but the board ruled it should be restored because the word was “being used in a reclaimed, positive, self-referential context.”
A comment made on Facebook about the Netflix program “Love on the Spectrum” was also stricken by the board, although Meta originally let it stand. The comment from a user said that “they see people on the spectrum as ‘a different species of human.'”
Meta had announced in January that it would shift to its current user-generated “Community Notes” format and would make efforts to reduce the amount of charged content on its platforms while giving users the opportunity to tailor how much they see.
