The board said it will start allowing people are expected to submit public comments for Trump’s review on Friday. An announcement in this case will be made until April.
“We think, after careful consideration, that there were difficult cases first, but we don’t think [Facebook] got it right, ”said Helle Thorning Schmidt, the former Danish prime minister and co-chairman of the Supervisory Board. “We are telling Facebook that they need to be better at telling users why their content is being removed.”
Among the posts that Facebook excluded, there was one citing Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, one showing women’s breasts and another that incited hate speech against Muslims.
In its first round of decisions made public on Thursday, the Oversight Board spent nearly two months reviewing a series of Facebook posts that the company had initially removed for breaking its content rules.
When asked whether Thursday’s decisions could be seen as a precedent for the next decision on Trump’s Facebook account, Thorning Schmidt said no. “You can’t understand any of that,” she said.
The group has the power to determine whether such exclusions were justified or unfairly restricted people’s freedom of expression, but experts cannot review Facebook posts that remain online.
That will change in the coming months, added Thorning Schmidt, and the group will have the power to judge posts that Facebook hasn’t removed.
The board is administered separately from the company, but its $ 130 million budget is provided by the technology giant. Online users or the company can ask the agency to review the cases, and more than 150,000 references have been sent since October. The group plans to announce its next round of cases on Friday.
Myanmar, Covid drugs
In a decision, the agency said a post by a user in Myanmar that appeared to criticize Muslims, which Facebook had removed because it said the content violated the company’s hate speech standards, should be reinstated because the text did not represent a direct attack on all Muslims.
In another, the group said that a Facebook post deleted from France that criticized the failure of local authorities to use hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, to treat Covid-19 – a denied claim that remains widely popular across the country – also it should be returned to social media platforms because it did not imply imminent damage to people’s lives.
A third decision ordered Facebook to reinstate an Instagram post in Brazil that included female nipples as part of a breast cancer awareness campaign, which the company’s automated content moderation system had initially removed for conflicting with the policy. of the photo sharing app. Facebook ended up publishing the image on Instagram, but outside experts criticized the company for not having enough human oversight of such automated decisions.
“Everyone can see that these are not easy cases and it has been difficult to reach a final decision,” said Thorning Schmidt, adding that not all decisions were universally supported by members of the group.
The only case in which the Supervisory Board agreed with Facebook’s decision to remove a post related to an attack in Russian against Azerbaijan that experts agreed that violated the company’s hate speech standards.
Despite the willingness of the outside group to reverse the way Facebook handles possible dubious posts on its platform, not everyone liked the increased oversight.
Damian Collins, a British lawmaker and co-founder of The Real Oversight Board, a campaign group that criticizes its namesake, said the body’s inability to review Facebook’s broader content moderation policies and not rule over potentially harmful posts that remained on the platform, made his work almost totally toothless.
“That kind of decision should not be left to Facebook,” he said. “The decision to remove the content must either be in the hands of a government or politically elected figures.”