Oversight board faults Facebook for handling rule on contentious content
Facebook "misplaced" guidance on an important
exemption to its rules on dangerous individuals and organizations for three
years, the company's independent oversight board said on Thursday.
The board, which was created by the company to rule on a small
slice of contentious content decisions, said it had overturned Facebook's
original removal of an Instagram post encouraging people to talk about the
solitary confinement of Abdullah Ocalan, a founding member of the Kurdistan
Workers' Party (PKK).
It said the content should never have been removed, but it also
said that after it selected the case, Facebook found a
relevant piece of its internal rules had "inadvertently not
transferred" to a new review system in 2018.
This guidance made an exception to Facebook's rules, which
prohibit support or praise of individuals or organizations it designates as
dangerous, to allow discussion on the conditions of confinement.
Facebook has
long been under scrutiny over what is allowed on its platforms and has been
criticized by the board for a lack of transparency around its rules. The board
said it was "concerned" that Facebook had lost an important policy
exemption for this time and that this could have led to other posts being
wrongly taken down.
It said the guidance, which was not shared with Facebook's policy
team, was developed in 2017 partly in response to concerns about the conditions
of Ocalan's imprisonment.
A company spokeswoman declined to answer Reuters questions about
how the policy was lost. The board said Facebook was conducting a review of how
it failed to transfer the guidance but said it was not "technically
feasible" to determine how many pieces of content were taken down while
the guidance was not available. Facebook had restored the content before the
board's decision.
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