To broaden its scope of operations, the Oversight Board for Meta Platforms revealed on Tuesday that it would consider more instances involving content moderation and make some decisions more quickly.
In late 2020, Facebook and Instagram established the Oversight Board to evaluate their judgments about whether to remove or leave up specific content and to make decisions about upholding or reversing those decisions. The board announced in a blog post that it has released 35 case rulings since then.
The board announced that it will now start posting some case decisions quickly. After accepting a case, decisions can be made in as little as 48 hours, while others might take up to 30 days.
It may take up to 90 days for the Oversight Board to assess Meta’s content moderation activities under standard rulings.
The board wrote in the blog post that publishing more decisions and speeding up the process will “enable us tackle more of the big challenges of content moderation, and respond more rapidly in cases with urgent real-world repercussions.”
Instead of the complete board, a panel of board members will examine accelerated cases, which do not take into account public opinions.
Recent Developments with the Oversight Board
The Oversight Board recently decided that Meta users might attack Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the context of protests in their country by using the slogan “death to Khamenei.”
In order to study situations in which Meta changed its mind about whether to leave up or remove posts, the board will also start providing summaries of its rulings. The board stated that these instances might aid Meta in preventing similar errors in the future and might be beneficial to researchers and the general public.
On Tuesday, they also announced Kenji Yoshino as a new board member who is a constitutional law professor at New York University School of Law. Yoshino brings the Oversight Board’s total membership to 23.