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.
