Meta’s Oversight Board, the independent group created to help Meta with content moderation decisions, on Tuesday issued its response to the social media company’s new hate speech policies announced in January.
The Board says that Meta’s new policies were “announced hastily, in a departure from regular procedure,” and called on the company to provide more information about its rules. In addition, the Board asked Meta to asses the impact of its new policies on vulnerable user groups, report those findings publicly, and update the Board every six months.
The Board says it’s in discussions with Meta to retool its fact-checking policies in regions outside the U.S., as well.
Just weeks before President Donald Trump took office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg embarked on an overhaul of the company’s content moderation policies in an effort to allow “more speech” on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. As part of this push, Meta rolled back hate speech rules that protected immigrants and LGBTQIA+ users across its various platforms.
Regarding Meta’s new policies, the Board says it issued 17 recommendations to Meta that, among other things, ask the company to measure the effectiveness of its new community notes system, clarify its revised stance on hateful ideologies, and improve how it enforces violations of its harassment policies. The Board says it has also asked Meta to uphold its 2021 commitment to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights by engaging with stakeholders impacted by the new policies. The Board says Meta should have done so in the first place.
The Oversight Board is limited in its ability to steer Meta’s broader policies. However, Meta must follow its rulings on individual posts, per the company’s own rules.
Should Meta grant the Board a policy advisory opinion referral — something it’s done a few times before — the group might have a channel to reshape Meta’s content moderation.
In decisions published on 11 cases concerning issues across Meta’s platforms — including anti-migrant speech, hate speech targeting people with disabilities, and suppression of LGBTQIA+ voices — the Oversight Board appeared to criticize several of the new content policies Zuckerberg announced earlier this year. Meta’s January policy changes did not affect the outcome of these decisions, the Board said.
In two U.S. cases involving videos of transgender women on Facebook and Instagram, the Board upheld Meta’s decision to leave the content up, despite user reports. However, the Board recommends that Meta remove the term “transgenderism” from its Hateful Conduct policy.
The Board overturned Meta’s decision to leave up three Facebook posts concerning anti-immigration riots that occurred in the U.K. during the summer of 2024. The Board found that Meta acted too slowly to remove anti-Muslim and anti-immigration content that violated the company’s violence and incitement policies.
