![]() “International human rights are not what the Facebook community standards are about. “The problem is it buys into the idea that Facebook is a government and the news feed is a public square,” says Persily. But if a government were to ban nudity, for example, as Facebook does in its community guidelines, that would be at odds with human rights law. To some, this approach lends weight to the argument that Facebook is, in effect, a public utility, or a quasi-world government with ultimate power over free speech. However, some experts argue that this jars: international human rights law is designed to govern states, not private companies. In its charter, Facebook outlines international human rights law as one of its guiding principles, and several experts in the field sit on the board. “If this was a court, you would have filings to that effect,” says Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School. He notes that a legal case would be more transparent: the board would have to publish exactly what it was requesting from Facebook which, in turn, would have to lay out precisely why it was not handing over the information. The board said there were numerous vague reasons cited by Facebook to explain their refusals, but these were light on detail. These included, for example, how Facebook’s news feed had affected how many people saw Trump’s posts. In an admission of the limitations of its own clout - and, perhaps, a snipe at Facebook - the board also noted that the company refused to answer seven requests for more information that it had submitted. The board upheld the suspension but pushed the decision on Trump’s ultimate fate - whether this should be permanent or not - straight back to Facebook. Trump supporters protest outside the US Capitol on January 6 © Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images “I’m so frustrated by the notion that this thing that was created by Facebook - for Facebook to shirk their own responsibility - is being treated like a ‘supreme court’.” “It’s a made-up corporate PR tool” says Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of the campaign group Accountable Tech. “It doesn’t look at things like groups, pages, down-ranking decisions, how the news feed works in terms of prioritisation, how Facebook treats entire accounts.”įacebook’s fiercest critics believe this renders the board a toothless “sham”, and that the company is merely trying to prove a self-regulation model works in order to stave off any legislation that could actually hurt its business. “It’s still looking at that very narrow slice of what content moderation is, namely how Facebook treats individual posts,” says Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School. And it has binding authority over a very narrow type of case: whether a removed piece of content should be reinstated or an offensive post should come down, and whether users should remain banned. This practice raises a number of human rights, transparency, and due process related concerns.It is currently funded - through a $130m trust - by Facebook. Law enforcement authorities may do this informally or through formal structures, such as Internal Referral Units (IRU). This practice of law enforcement flagging content for companies to review against their Terms of Service (TOS) is part of a growing arsenal state authorities use to pursue content removal from online services. The user who created the post was notified by Meta both times their content was removed but was not informed that the removals were initiated by a request from UK law enforcement. ![]() The post was then reviewed by an internal team at Meta and was taken down for violating the company’s Violence and Incitement policy, which Meta informed the Board can only be enforced by Meta’s internal teams. It is not clear from the Case Summary whether the authority identified the post to be a violation of local UK law. The law enforcement authority informed Meta that the post referenced a past shooting and could provoke further violence. The post featured a short clip from a new drill music video from rapper Chinx (OS). The Center for Democracy & Technology welcomes the opportunity to provide comments on case 2022-007-IG-MR (updated link) before the Facebook Oversight Board regarding the takedown of an Instagram post following a request from UK law enforcement alleging that the post may contribute to offline violence.Ī post from an account promoting UK drill music was taken down by Instagram following a request from local law enforcement.
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