The board said it would start to allow people to comment Friday for the Trump review. An announcement will be made in April.
‘We think, after careful consideration, that there were difficult cases in the first place, but we do not think [Facebook] got it right, ”said Helle Thorning Schmidt, the former Danish prime minister and co-chair of the supervisory board. “We tell Facebook to better tell users why their content is being removed.”
One of the messages that Facebook deleted was one that quoted Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, one that showed women’s breasts and another that read hate speech against Muslims.
In the first round of decisions announced Thursday, the Supervisory Board spent nearly two months on a series of Facebook posts that the company originally removed for violating its content rules.
Asked if Thursday’s decisions could be seen as a precedent for the upcoming ruling on Trump’s Facebook account, Thorning Schmidt said no. “You can read nothing in it,” she said.
The group has the power to determine whether such deletions are justified or unfairly restrict people’s freedom of speech, but the experts cannot review Facebook posts that remain online.
Thorning Schmidt will change that in the next few months, and the group will have the power to judge posts that Facebook has not removed.
The board is managed separately from the company, but the $ 130 million budget is provided by the technology giant. Online users or the company can ask the body to review cases, and more than 150,000 referrals have been submitted since October. The group plans to announce its next round of affairs on Friday.
Myanmar, Covid drugs
In one ruling, the body said that a message from a user in Myanmar criticizing Muslims, who had removed Facebook because it allegedly violated the company’s hate speech standards, should be reinstated because the text was not a direct attack does not represent. on all Muslims.
In another group, the group said a deleted Facebook entry from France criticizing local officials for not using hydroxychloroquine, a malaria remedy, to treat Covid-19 – an undisputed allegation which is still popular across the country – should also be on social media platforms because it does not represent a threatening damage to people’s lives.
A third decision has prompted Facebook to reinstate an Instagram post from Brazil, which includes female nipples, as part of a breast cancer awareness campaign, which initially removed the company’s automated moderation system because it violated the app’s nudity policy for shared photos. Eventually, Facebook posted the image on Instagram, but outside experts criticized the company for not having adequate human oversight over such automated decisions.
“Everyone can see that these are not easy matters and that it was difficult to reach a final decision,” Thorning Schmidt said.
The only case in which the supervisory board agreed with Facebook’s decision to remove a post related to a Russian language attack on Azerbaijanis, which the experts agree, violated the company’s standards for hate speech.
Despite the outside group’s willingness to stop Facebook from handling potentially dubious posts on its platform, not everyone welcomed the increased surveillance.
Damian Collins, a British lawmaker and co-founder of The Real Oversight Board, a campaign group critical of its namesake, said the body was unable to review Facebook’s broader policy and that it did not rule on potentially damaging posts that remained on the platform made his work mostly toothless.
“These types of decisions should not be left to Facebook,” he said. “The decision to remove content or not must be in the hands of a government or politically elected figure.”