The Oversight Board for Meta Platforms said on Tuesday that it will look at more types of content moderation cases and make some decisions faster so that it can do more work.
The Oversight Board was made at the end of 2020. Its job is to look at Facebook and Instagram’s decisions about taking down or leaving up certain content and decide if the social media companies did the right thing or not. In a blog post, the board said that since then, it has put out 35 case decisions.
The 22-person board said it will now start publishing decisions on some cases more quickly. After taking a case, decisions could be made as quickly as 48 hours or as long as 30 days.
Standard decisions can take up to 90 days. This is because the Oversight Board looks closely at how Meta moderates content.
In a blog post, the board said that publishing more decisions and making the pace faster will let them “take on more of the big challenges of content moderation and respond more quickly to situations with urgent real-world consequences.”
Unlike regular decisions, expedited cases will be looked at by a small group of board members, not the whole board, and public comments will not be taken into account.
The board will also start putting out summaries of decisions to look into cases where Meta changed its mind about whether to keep a post up or take it down. The board said that such cases could help Meta avoid making the same mistakes in the future and could be useful for researchers and the public.
It was also announced on Tuesday that constitutional law professor Kenji Yoshino from the New York University School of Law would join the board as a new member.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
