Meta’s Oversight Board Reports Positive Changes to Company Regulations

The Oversight Board, consisting of around 20 human rights and free speech experts, has released its annual report on its activities and engagement with Meta over the past year. Despite acknowledging that the company still has room for improvement in certain areas, the board claims that its suggestions have contributed to greater transparency in Meta’s regulations for its users.

Last year’s report strongly criticized Meta’s lack of transparency, but the latest report highlights the impact of the board’s recommendations on the company. “In 2022, it was encouraging to note that for the first time, Meta made systematic changes to its rules and their enforcement, including its user notes and dangerous organizations rules,” the board wrote in a statement.

The report also highlights areas where its members believe Meta can improve. According to the report, Meta reversed its initial moderation decision in nearly two-thirds of the cases selected for review board review, “raising broader questions about the accuracy of the meta content moderation and appeals process.”

The board also notes that more than two years have passed since it recommended the company better align its policies between Instagram and Facebook, but the company has “repeatedly pushed back the deadline” to do so. The group is also addressing Meta’s refusal to translate internal guidelines for content moderators into their native languages. Meta claimed that all Moderators are fluent in English, so the step is unnecessary. But the board says “English-only instructions can cause evaluators to lose context and nuance between different languages and dialects,” which can lead to implementation errors.

The report also describes a lack of transparency about some aspects of Meta’s “newsworthy” exception, which allows some posts that violate the rules to remain online if the company determines the content has “public interest value.” According to the watchdog, “little is still known about the process [Meta] uses to decide whether content is newsworthy” and that the company’s responses to direct-answer questions are classified as political.

The board’s report states that there were other frustrating moments in his interactions with Meta. At one point, the board noted that it took eight months for its members to access the company’s CrowdTangle analytics tool. The board also notes that many of its decisions last year were published after the 90-day deadline set in its rules. The board cites a few reasons for the delays, but says that in some cases the delay was due to “negotiations with Meta about the amount of information that the company initially provided in confidence that we can include in our final decision.” “took longer than expected”.

It is also worth noting how few cases end up before the Supervisory Board. In the report, the government said it issued 12 rulings in 2022 — a fraction of the nearly 1.3 million requests it received from users hoping to overturn one of Meta’s moderate rulings. The board states that it deliberately selects cases whose members believe they will have a significant impact on Meta’s user base. However, the figures highlight the fact that this government will never be able to fulfill the majority of the applications it receives, despite more than $280 million in Meta funding. However, the oversight board said it plans to move faster in some cases and that it will issue expedited “summary decisions” in some cases starting this year.

Interestingly, the report also addresses Meta’s suggestion that other social media companies should consider using an oversight board. “We are interested in working with companies that share our belief that transparent and accountable content management, overseen by independent parties, is an essential part of creating an online environment that respects free speech and other human rights,” the report says.

It remains unclear how Meta’s colleagues will continue to work with the group – or whether they want to do so – but the board clearly believes it has information that other companies could benefit from. “We do not seek to be the governing body of the entire industry,” said Thomas Hughes, head of the oversight council, in the report. “But we’re looking to share what we’ve learned and work with companies that are interested in setting up different bodies to set standards and oversee content management.”