Meta’s Oversight Board Is Worried Meta’s New Policies Will Harm Human Rights

On Wednesday, Meta’s Oversight Board called on the company to evaluate how recent policy change’s may negatively impact human rights. The Board’s request comes alongside its publication of its first 11 case decisions following Meta’s sweeping policy changes at the start of the year.

Meta’s January policy changes included overhauling content moderation, lifting restrictions on hot button political topics like immigration, and ending third party fact-checking in favor of X-style community notes. When announcing its policy changes, Meta said that its platforms are meant to be somewhere “people can express themselves freely” — even if things gets ugly. In a video statement, CEO Mark Zuckerberg added that, “[W]e’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” 

In Wednesday’s press release, the board expressed concern about Meta’s updated policies, noting that “no public information [was] shared as to what, if any, prior human rights due diligence the company performed” before the change. The board called on Meta to address adverse impacts that its policies may have on communities like LGBGQ+ people, including minors, and immigrants. Additionally, the board requested that Meta review the effectiveness of the Community Notes system especially as it pertains to combatting misinformation.

As for the decisions themselves, the board sided with Meta on a number of issues, but disagreed on others, echoing their larger concern about potential human rights violations. The board overturned Meta’s decision to keep up three posts related to last summer’s riots in the United Kingdom, stating that “the likelihood of their inciting additional and imminent unrest and violence was significant.” They’ve requested those posts be removed. In separate cases, the board also overturned Meta decision to keep up content “including a racist slur and generalizations of migrants as sexual predators” and noted concerns regarding “dehumanizing speech” about disabled people that the company’s systems failed to detect.

However, the board upheld some of Meta’s controversial decisions including allowing two posts about transgender peoples’ bathroom access and participation in sports to remain up. Although the posts are “intentionally provocative…they related to matters of public concern and would not incite likely and imminent violence or discrimination.”

The Oversight Board’s requests comes weeks after a former Facebook employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, released a book recounting her time at the company and observing a pattern of Zuckerberg announcing new policies without consultation and ignoring potentials harms created by the platform. It’s also only a day after Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s co-founder, testified for the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Meta. He stated that Instagram received “zero” money Zuckerberg committed to spending in trust and safety resources after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. So, when it comes to safety, Meta isn’t looking good on multiple fronts.

Thing is, Meta’s disastrous human rights impacts are already well-documented. For example, it played a significant role in the Rohingya genocide and is systemically censoring content about Palestine. The Human Rights Campaign even recognized that Meta’s changes “will normalize anti-LGBTQ+ misinformation and intensity anti-LGBTQ+ harassment” and, in February, Amnesty International warned that Meta’s policies may fuel more mass violence and genocide.

The board’s request for Meta to assess the impact of its policies is cool and all but it’s unclear what that will really do. After all, Meta’s new policies blatantly use dogwhistle terms like “transgenderism”. and the training materials regarding newly permissible speech included “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit”, “Black people are more violent than whites”, or “Trans people are mentally ill” as examples. Maybe time to consider that Meta’s sloppy policies — and their impacts — are not an oversight.