Meta's oversight board has now expanded its scope to include the company's newest platform, Instagram Threads. Designed as an independent appellate board that hears cases and makes precedent-setting content moderation decisions, the commission has previously investigated Facebook's banning of Donald Trump, COVID-19 misinformation, She has made decisions on lawsuits such as the removal of breast cancer photos.
The board has now begun hearing a lawsuit brought out by Meta's Twitter/X competitor, Threads.
This is a key differentiator between Threads and rivals like X. On X, Elon Musk and other users rely heavily on crowdsourced fact-checking through community notes, supplementing otherwise light moderation. It's also very different from how decentralized solutions like Mastodon and Bluesky manage moderation duties on their platforms. Decentralization allows community members to establish their own servers with their own set of moderation rules, and gives them the option to dis-federate from other servers whose content violates the guidelines.
Startup Bluesky is also investing in stackable moderation. This means that community members can create and run their own moderation services, which can be combined with other services to create a customized experience for individual users.
Meta's move to delegate difficult decisions that could overturn Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to an independent board of directors is a solution to Meta's problems with centralized authority and control over content moderation. It was supposed to be. But as these startups have shown, there are other ways to give users more control over what they see without trampling on the rights of others.
Nevertheless, the oversight board announced Thursday that it would hear the first lawsuit from the thread.
The lawsuit includes a user's response to a post that includes a screenshot of a news article in which Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made a statement about the alleged underreporting of his party's fundraising revenue. The post also included a caption criticizing tax evasion, including a derogatory term and the word “dead.” Derogatory terms were also used for people who wear glasses. Meta's human judges found the post to be in violation of the company's Violence and Incitement Policy, despite its “drop dead” component and hashtag calling for death, making it look a lot like recent X posts. It was determined that After his appeal was rejected for the second time, the user appealed to the board.
The board said it selected this matter to investigate Meta's enforcement of its content moderation policies and practices against political content on threads. This is a timely move considering this is an election year and Meta has vowed to not actively promote political content on Instagram or threads.
The board's lawsuit is the first involving Thread, but it will not be the last. The organization is already preparing to announce another series of cases tomorrow that will focus on alleged crimes based on nationality. The latter case was referred to the board by Meta, but as with the case involving Prime Minister Kishida, the board plans to accept and consider appeals from thread users.
The decisions the Board makes will depend on how Threads chooses as a platform to support users' ability to freely express themselves on the platform, or whether Threads will moderate content more tightly than Twitter/X. will affect. That ultimately helps shape public opinion about the platform, influencing users to choose one over the other or startups experimenting with new ways to moderate content in a more personalized way.