Facebook “Oversight” Board To Revenue Sites More Quickly

(NewsGlobal.com)- Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced earlier this week that it would be stepping up its efforts at content moderation, and that it would expedite some of its decisions surrounding the topic.

On Tuesday, the Meta Platforms’ Oversight Board made this announcement, saying it was looking to expand the work that it is doing. The board was created near the end of 2020, and was dedicated to reviewing the decisions made by Instagram and Facebook regarding whether to leave up or take down certain pieces of content.

The board was also given the power to rule on whether they believed those actions by either of the social media platforms should remain in place or be overturned. In a recent blog post, the board said they have published 35 decisions on these cases since it was originally formed.

In a change of approach, the board did say that it has plans to start publishing the decisions on some of the cases it hears expeditiously. They said some of the rulings could end up being determined within 48 hours of the case being accepted, with others taking as many as 30 days to be decided on and published.

Any standard decision the board makes could take as many as 90 days for a ruling to happen, because the board will review the content moderation actions that Meta takes much more in-depth.

As the board wrote in the story on its blog, publishing additional decisions and also increasing the pace of those decisions will “let us tackle more of the big challenges of content moderations, and respond more quickly in situations with urgent real-world consequences.”

In standard decisions, every member of the board reviews the case, and the board also considers any public comments. In expedited cases, no public comments will be considered, and it will only be reviewed by a smaller panel of these board members.

A recent ruling that the Oversight Board handed down was allowing users on Meta platforms to use the slogan “death to Khamenei.” That phrase has been used by users to criticize Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, in the context of the protests going on right now in his country.

In addition to the expedited cases, the Oversight Board announced it would begin to publish summary decisions so that it could analyze cases where Meta changed its mind about either taking down or leaving up posts on their sites. The board said this could ultimately help Meta to avoid making those mistakes again in the future. Members also said it could prove to be useful for civil society and researchers as well.

The blog post also said that the board will be adding a new member to its board – Kenji Yoshino, who serves as a constitutional law professor at the New York University School of Law. This addition brings the total number of Oversight Board members up to 23.