Twelve days before the elections, Meta’s supervisory board is concerned about the moderation of political statements

With twelve full days to go until the 2024 US presidential election, there are still concerns about whether Meta can properly moderate political content on its platforms.

Two months ago, a Facebook user superimposed the faces of presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, on top of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels’ characters in the Stupid and stupider movie poster. The poster features Carrey and Daniels’ characters grabbing each other’s nipples — you know the ones. The user then captioned it with the emojis “🤷‍♂️🖕🖕.”

Meta removed the post because it violated the platform’s community standard for bullying and harassment, specifically because that standard does not allow “derogatory sexualized photoshop or drawings.” The user appealed Meta’s decision, resulting in the decision being transferred to Meta’s Oversight Board. Meta then determined that the deletion was incorrect and restored the post to Facebook.

Meta’s Oversight Board is a group of more than 20 members, including academics, policymakers and journalists, and makes decisions about moderating content on Facebook and Instagram. The board wrote that Meta’s handling of this post gives them “serious concerns” about Meta’s ability to moderate political content on its platforms.

“This message is nothing more than an everyday satirical image of prominent politicians and is immediately recognizable as such,” the board writes. It continued:

In the context of elections, the Board of Directors previously recommended that Meta develop a framework for evaluating its election integrity efforts, to provide the company with relevant data to improve its content moderation system as a whole and decide how its resources can best be deployed. electoral contexts.

It then referred to an earlier case involving a general in Brazil who called on activists to “take to the streets” during the 2022 elections – a comment linked to protesters storming Brazil’s National Congress and Supreme Court. At the time, the board made the opposite decision: that Meta failed not removing the general’s comments in a timely manner to prevent the situation from becoming even more volatile. The administration apparently wants to see progress in creating a system of rules that would encompass the false negatives of the past as well as the false positives.

The statement continued:

Meta has reported progress in implementing this recommendation. Nevertheless, the company’s failure to recognize the nature of this message and address it accordingly raises serious concerns about the systems and resources available to Meta to effectively make substantive decisions in such electoral contexts.

The board wrote that it sees an “over-enforcement of Meta’s bullying and harassment policies regarding satire and political speech in the form of non-sexualized derogatory portrayals of political figures.” It says this over-enforcement could lead to “the excessive removal of political speech and undermine the ability to criticize government officials and political candidates, including in sarcasm.”