Meta’s oversight board rebukes company over policy overhaul

By Katie Paul and Echo Wang

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Meta Platforms’ Oversight Board on Wednesday sharply rebuked the Facebook and Instagram owner over a policy overhaul in January that cut fact-checking and eased curbs on discussions of contentious topics such as immigration and gender identity.

The board, which operates independently but is funded by Meta, urged the world's biggest social media company to assess “potential adverse effects” of the changes, put in place just before U.S. President Donald Trump began his second term.

It cited concerns that Meta had announced the changes “hastily, in a departure from regular procedure, with no public information shared as to what, if any, prior human rights due diligence the company performed.”

The announcement set the board on a possible collision course with Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who has been working this year to mend fences with Trump and roll back a decade’s worth of initiatives aimed at mitigating harms like hate speech, misinformation and incitement to violence on his company’s services.

It came as the board issued its first rulings on individual content cases since the January changes, in some upholding Meta's decisions to leave up controversial content like posts discussing transgender peoples' access to bathrooms, and in others requiring the company to remove posts containing racist slurs.

Meta, in a statement provided by a spokesperson, said it welcomed the board’s decisions “that leave up or restore content in the interest of promoting free expression on our platforms.” It did not address the other rulings that called for content to be removed.

With its January shake-up, Meta scrapped its U.S. fact-checking program and reduced curbs on discussion of contentious topics, bowing to longstanding criticism from conservatives that its content moderation practices had gone too far.

Zuckerberg said in announcing the policy changes that those mitigation efforts had resulted in “too many mistakes and too much censorship,” although the company did not provide examples of overreach or data on error rates.

Meta removed restrictions on referring to gay people as mentally ill and to women as “household objects or property” and said it would stop proactively scanning its platforms for unspecified “less severe policy violations.” Instead, it said, it would aim its automated systems only at detecting content like terrorism, child sexual exploitation and fraud. 

Along with its individual case decisions, the Oversight Board made 17 recommendations related to the overhaul, calling on the company to improve enforcement of its bullying and harassment policies and clarify precisely which hateful ideologies are banned on its services.

It urged Meta to assess whether the changes could have “uneven consequences globally, especially in countries experiencing current or recent crises, such as armed conflicts.” 

It also asked Meta to assess the effectiveness of its new Community Notes tool and disclose the results every six months. The tool, which is similar to one used by Elon Musk's X, replaced the company’s partnerships with news organizations and fact-checking groups as its primary mechanism for curbing the viral spread of false information.

Reuters was one of Meta’s partners on its fact-checking program.

Meta said it would respond to the board’s recommendations within 60 days.

META STILL COMMITTED TO BOARD

Despite the company's content moderation pivot, Co-Chair of the Oversight Board Paolo Carozza said all signals currently pointed toward Meta remaining committed to its work with the board.

“We have no reason to think that Meta is soured on the board or planning to make any large scale structural changes in terms of its commitment with the board,” he told Reuters. 

Carozza said Meta has continued to send a steady stream of new cases to the Oversight Board since January, consistent with volumes over the past four years, and to follow up on its recommendations.

Meta has committed to funding the Oversight Board through 2027, with at least $35 million allocated annually over the next three years, according to a blog post by the Oversight Board last year.

The Meta spokesperson told Reuters the company’s commitment to that funding remained unchanged.

Meta previously committed $150 million to the board in 2022 and $130 million when the board was launched in 2019.

As with previous allocations, the latest funding will be placed in the Board’s Irrevocable Trust, a mechanism designed to protect the body’s operational independence.

(Reporting by Katie Paul and Echo Wang in New York; editing by Kenneth Li and Sonali Paul)