Facebook fails to enforce its rules, says Oversight Board

Facebook’s Oversight Board released its first five decisions since its members started meeting last year

Facebook’s Oversight Board, the body that acts as a Supreme Court for how the social network polices its service, revealed an unsurprising reality on Thursday: Facebook often fails to properly enforce its rules.

The board released its first five decisions since its members started meeting last year. Four of the five rulings overturned decisions Facebook’s moderating team previously made.

The four cases may seem small statistically speaking, compared to the hundreds of thousands of posts that are published on Facebook every day. But even if they represent a small portion of posts, the implications are large.

Even a small percentage of incorrect decisions would still represent hundreds of hundreds of posts a day, said Nadine Strossen, former head of the American Civil Liberties Union. So a small percentage error percentage is very severe.

The first five cases covered user posts from around the world that Facebook removed for allegedly violate its policies on hate speech, violence and incitement. In the four other cases, the board suggested Facebook overreached when it chose to remove the posts and called for those posts to reinstated, which Facebook has now done.

Today’s decisions (and future board decisions) are binding on Facebook, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of content policy, said in a blog post. We will restore or remove content based on their determination.

The board’s decisions come as Facebook struggles to balance free speech against the potential to create real-world harm. It also precedes one of the biggest cases the board will have to rule on in upcoming weeks: Whether to uphold Facebook’s decision to ban former President Donald Trump, who was booted following U.S. Capitol riots on Jan. 6.

Conservatives, who have long blasted Facebook for unfairly censoring their views, will likely see the board’s decisions as a win. The board, made up of 20 international human rights experts and civic leaders, ruled in favour of free speech in most cases.

Strossen said the rulings are unsurprising given that international human rights are “remarkably speech protective.”

Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford University, took to Twitter to explain what the decisions tell the public about the board.

The fact that the Oversight Board overturned four of the five takedowns gives us a sense that it is likely to take more libertarian and speech-protective positions than Facebook, he tweeted on Thursday. This is not where most public opinion is, of course.