Facebook’s oversight board, the “supreme court” set up by the company to relieve Mark Zuckerberg of having the final say over moderation, has issued its first decisions, overturning the social network’s choices on four of the five first cases it has heard.
The cases, all of which were appeals to reinstate content taken down by Facebook, covered a wide range of topics, from female nudity, to Russian-language ethnic slurs, through islamophobia and Covid misinformation. The board’s decisions are binding under the agreement between Facebook and its quasi-independent overseer. Facebook now has seven days to restore content in the four cases where the board deemed it necessary.
The first case to be overturned involved Facebook’s decision to take down, for hate speech, a post from Myanmar which accused Muslims of being inhumane and psychologically maladapted. The board disagreed with Facebook’s translation of the caption, arguing that it was not directly derogatory, and said that the important context is that the text was accompanied by a contrast between reactions to cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, and the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang. “That expression of opinion is protected under Facebook’s Community Standards and does not reach the level of hate speech,” the board concluded.
That decision was harshly criticised by the US civil liberties group Muslim Advocates, which accused the oversight board of “bending over backwards to excuse hate in Myanmar – a country where Facebook has been complicit in a genocide against Muslims.”
“It is clear that the oversight board is here to launder responsibility for Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg,” spokesman Eric Naing said. “Instead of taking meaningful action to curb dangerous hate speech on the platform, Facebook punted responsibility to a third party board that used laughable technicalities to protect anti-Muslim hate content that contributes to genocide.”
In a very different case, the board also took an appeal from a Brazilian user who had posted a picture promoting awareness of signs of breast cancer. The picture was automatically removed by Instagram’s systems, which wrongly classified it as adult content, but after the board selected the case, Facebook restored the post and argued that the restoration made it moot. In its conclusion, which agreed that Facebook was right to restore the image, the board also provided recommendations to Facebook, advising that the company ensure that users can appeal automated decisions to a human being, and specifically revise Instagram’s guidelines to allow female nipples to be shown to raise breast cancer awareness.
The most contentious decision is likely to be a decision to restore Covid misinformation posted by a French user to the site. In the post, removed by Facebook but referred by the company directly to the board, the user claimed that hydroxychloroquine could “cure” Covid-19. The drug is not effective against the virus.
Facebook argued that the post ran the risk of causing imminent harm, but was overruled by the oversight board, which instead concluded that “the user was opposing a governmental policy and aimed to change that policy”. The decision to block the post “did not comply with international human rights standards on limiting freedom of expression”, the board added, in requiring the post to be restored.
In a statement, Facebook said: “The board rightfully raises concerns that we can be more transparent about our Covid-19 misinformation policies. We agree that these policies could be clearer and intend to publish updated Covid-19 misinformation policies soon. We do believe, however, that it is critical for everyone to have access to accurate information, and our current approach in removing misinformation is based on extensive consultation with leading scientists, including from the CDC and WHO. During a global pandemic this approach will not change.”
In the final overturned decision, the board agreed with a user that a quote intended to compare Donald Trump to Joseph Goebbels was not intended to praise Goebbels. The board sided with Facebook on a single case, agreeing that a post referring to Azerbaijanis as “тазики” or washbowl, was intended as a pun on the word “азики”, an ethnic slur for the nation.
While Facebook has committed to following the board’s main decisions, it has made no similar promise about whether to follow the extensive recommendations the oversight board has made alongside. That advice, which pushes for Facebook to be clearer in its community guidelines, better in its moderation, and more transparent in its enforcement, can be rejected by the social network, although it has committed to responding to the recommendations within a month.
In the near future, the board will also be issuing a finding to its most high-profile case to date, and possibly ever – the decision to suspend Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram.
“Recent events in the United States and around the world have highlighted the enormous impact that content decisions taken by internet services have on human rights and free expression,” the board said. “The challenges and limitations of the existing approaches to moderating content draw attention to the value of independent oversight of the most consequential decisions by companies such as Facebook.”
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