The Meta Oversight Board — in a rare display — actually ruled against Facebook and Instagram’s censorship regime and stood partially in favor of free speech.
The infamously anti-free speech Oversight Board made a surprising 180-degree turnaround and rebuffed Facebook’s gambit to remove videos exposing the extent of Hamas atrocities in Israel during the Oct. 7 genocidal attack through its automated system. One video in particular was the focus of the Board’s decision, which involved a censored clip showing a woman begging Hamas terrorists for her life as they kidnapped her, along with another hostage and the message “Israel is under attack.” According to the Oversight Board, such videos should still require a warning screen but otherwise should be available for Facebook users to see and share. The Board even critiqued Meta for not fully living up to its “responsibilities to respect freedom of expression.”
“The Board overturns Meta’s original decision to remove the content from Facebook,” the Board announced. “It finds that restoring the content to the platform, with a ‘mark as disturbing’ warning screen, is consistent with Meta’s content policies, values and human-rights responsibilities. However, the Board also concludes that Meta’s demoting of the restored content, in the form of its exclusion from the possibility of being recommended, does not accord with the company’s responsibilities to respect freedom of expression.”
The lengthy decision “overturned” Meta’s original plan, which was actually to censor more heavily as content around the current Israel-Hamas war began to appear across Facebook and Instagram. This appears to confirm a previous accusation that Instagram removed videos exposing the terrorists’ actions.
Since Hamas is a “designated Tier 1 organization under Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals Community Standard,” the company pounced on any potentially violative content on its platforms, supposedly for “safety,” with insufficient resources for human review. The Oversight Board sided against Meta in deeming the content important for the public to access.
While “[t]he Violence and Incitement Community Standard generally allows content that depicts kidnappings and abductions in a limited number of contexts,” Meta doesn’t apply this exception for some terrorist attacks. But as families of hostages shared content online, Meta implemented an exception— and the Board ruled in favor of restoring content. The Oversight Board even engaged in an “Expedited Review” of the video of the kidnapped woman and the circumstances around its censorship.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Facebook headquarters at (650) 308-7300 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “misinformation” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
