Where Meta's biggest experiment in governance went wrong
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Rohingya genocide
13 min read
The article mentions the Rohingya genocide as one of the crises that led to the creation of the Oversight Board. Understanding the full scope of this atrocity—and Facebook's documented role in amplifying hate speech that fueled it—provides essential context for why external content moderation oversight was deemed necessary.
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Cambridge Analytica
10 min read
Cited as another foundational crisis that prompted the Oversight Board's creation. The data harvesting scandal involving millions of Facebook users and its connection to political manipulation represents a pivotal moment in tech accountability that readers may not fully understand beyond headlines.
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2017–2018 Iranian protests
13 min read
The article highlights the Oversight Board's decision allowing Iranian protesters to post 'death to Khamenei' as political speech. Understanding the context of Iranian protest movements and the significance of this phrase in Iranian political discourse illuminates why this content moderation decision mattered.
Five years ago this week, Meta's Oversight Board accepted its first cases. Together, they highlighted the company's global reach — cases originated in Malaysia, Azerbaijan, and Brazil, among other countries — and the high-stakes hair-splitting that Meta's content moderation apparatus attempts to navigate. When is it OK for a woman's nipple to appear on Facebook? Can you quote Goebbels, if it's actually a commentary on rising fascism in America? At what point does a veiled threat against the president of France become an incitement to violence?
Over the past half-decade, the Oversight Board has sought to make decisions like these more consistently, and in public. In more than 200 published decisions, and 317 policy recommendations to Meta, the board has sought to draw brighter lines around what is and is not allowed.
The Oversight Board emerged from a series of crises, including the Rohingya genocide, Cambridge Analytica, and the larger backlash against Facebook following Donald Trump's election as president in 2016. At the time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had the final say over the fate of every post on his platforms; the Oversight Board represented an effort to restore public trust by creating a check on that power.
A retrospective on its first five years published by the board today documents the results of its efforts, including a push to allow Iranian protesters to post "death to Khamenei" as political speech, and an agreement from Meta to tell you which specific rule your post violated when removing it. The board also led an inquiry that resulted in Meta acknowledging its over-moderation of Palestinian content in 2021 had an "adverse human rights impact" on Palestinians' free expression.
Meta, for its part, has funded the board through the next two years.
At the same time, it seems likely that most users of Facebook and Instagram still have little to no idea that the board exists. The board was at its most prominent in 2021, when Meta asked it to consider whether Trump should be permanently banned for his actions related to the January 6 Capitol riots. But the board punted that decision back to Meta, and since then has largely faded from public view.
The board has done some good work. But it has taken on disappointingly few cases, and can sometimes take the better part of a year to render a decision, even when the post in question has credibly ...
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