Facebook’s Oversight Board, which oversees its content moderation policies, announced that it would reprioritize to focus on cases involving elections, gender expression, and hate speech.
The Meta Oversight Board announced on Thursday that it was incorporating seven “strategic priorities” while working with stakeholders to change the company’s content moderation focus. The priorities include managing content related to crisis and conflict situations, gender, hate speech against marginalized groups, governmental use of Meta platforms, treating users fairly, and the automated enforcement of policies.
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“Social media companies face a significant challenge when moderating content: which rules should apply to billions of people of different nationalities, languages, and cultures?” the board wrote. “We think international human rights standards are a crucial part of the answer.”
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The strategic priorities were decided based on the analysis of cases submitted to the board and issues that affect countries worldwide. For example, the board intends to review how it manages the ability of users to express political beliefs while also ensuring free speech.
The board intends to deal with how it manages expressions of gay and transgender identity on the platform. It also plans to review how the company’s automated content moderation algorithms manage nuanced subjects, such as when showing exposed breasts is permissible. Meta’s algorithm has struggled with how to manage when an exposed female breast is artistically or otherwise acceptable, often banning breast cancer-related ads without warning or provocation.
Finally, the board said it intended to review how well it communicated the breach of rules when an account was barred and the transparency surrounding the automated enforcement of content curation.
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The board also said it intended to work with Meta shareholders to ensure the board, which has no real enforcement power over the company, understands Meta’s content moderation priorities. It also intended to advocate other companies to implement similar third-party entities to keep their content moderation in check.
The board was proposed by Meta as a third-party panel to oversee and review the company’s content moderation decisions. Most notably, it upheld the decision to ban former President Donald Trump permanently from returning to Facebook. However, Meta executive Nick Clegg said the platform would consider letting Trump on after his ban expired.
