Meta’s independent (albeit Meta-funded) Oversight Board has vowed to become a whole lot more active.
The board exists to grapple with particularly troublesome content-moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram. It’s been hearing appeals against initial moderation decisions for a couple of years now, but during that time it’s only made 186 recommendations to Meta, and the company has only agreed to reverse its original decision in 80 of those cases—the most famous example was probably Meta’s conversion of its indefinite suspension of former President Donald Trump into a two-year ban that ended last month. What’s more, the Oversight Board’s activities have been somewhat opaque, as the panel published just 35 of its case decisions.
To put these numbers into context, the board said in its latest quarterly transparency report—also published today—that Facebook and Instagram users had submitted a whopping 193,137 cases to it in the last quarter of 2022 alone.
This morning, the board said it was amending its rules to allow expedited decisions that will mostly follow referrals from Meta itself, and could be produced within just two days in some cases—the outside limit is 30 days. That’s only a third of the time limit granted to standard decisions, but then again these fast-tracked cases won’t allow input from the public. They will still be binding on the company.
The Oversight Board will also start publishing “summary decisions” on cases—referred by the public—in which Meta decided to reverse its initial content-moderation call. “These decisions will include information about Meta’s original error, which may be useful to researchers and civil society groups,” the board said. The board also announced the addition of Kenji Yoshino, a New York University legal expert, to its ranks.
It’s unlikely that today’s changes will dispel all the criticisms of the Oversight Board setup—it still can’t make policy recommendations that are binding on Meta, for one thing—but it should go some way toward addressing one of the big gripes: that its impact is severely limited by its tiny caseload.
“While the in-depth review of our standard decisions and policy advisory opinions will remain a key part of our work, we are also exploring new ways to increase our impact and improve how Meta treats people and communities around the world,” the board said in its statement today. “Increasing the number of decisions we produce, and the speed at which we do so, will let us tackle more of the big challenges of content moderation, and respond more quickly in situations with urgent real-world consequences.”
What remains to be seen is how much this shift moves the needle—unless the Oversight Board suddenly finds itself with a vast increase in resources, it still seems unlikely that regular Facebook or Instagram users will find it appreciably easier to successfully appeal against their content being taken down.
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David Meyer
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.
