Meta’s Oversight Board takes its first Threads case | TechCrunch

Meta’s Oversight Board has now expanded its scope to include the company’s newest platform, Instagram Threads. designed as a independent appeals board Which hears cases and then makes precedent-setting content moderation decisions, the board has to date heard cases like Facebook banning Donald Trump, COVID-19 misinformation, removing breast cancer photos, and more. Matters have been decided.

Now the board has started hearing cases related to Meta’s Twitter/X competitor threads.

This is a key point of differentiation between Threads and rivals like X, where Elon Musk and other users rely heavily on crowdsourced fact-checking by community notes to supplement its otherwise light moderation. It’s also very different from how decentralized solutions like Mastodon and Bluesky are managing moderation duties on their platforms. Decentralization allows community members to set up their own servers with their own set of moderation rules and gives them the option to de-federate from other servers whose content runs contrary to their guidelines.

Startup Bluesky is also investing in stackable moderation, meaning community members can Build and run your own moderation servicesWhich can be combined with others to create a customized experience for each individual user.

Meta’s move to put tough decisions on an independent board who can rule the company And its CEO Mark Zuckerberg aimed to solve Meta’s problem of centralized authority and control over content moderation. But as these startups have shown, there are other ways to do it that allow users to have more control over what they see, without stepping on the rights of others.

Nevertheless, the Oversight Board announced on Thursday that Listen to its first case From threads.

The case involves a user’s reply to a post containing a screenshot of a news article in which Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made a statement about his party allegedly reducing fundraising revenues. The post also included a caption criticizing him for tax evasion and included derogatory language as well as the phrase “drop dead”. In this, derogatory language was also used for the person wearing glasses. Due to the “drop dead” component and hashtags invoking death, a human reviewer at Meta decided that the post violated the company’s violence and provocation rule—not your run-of-the-mill X post these days. Despite what it may seem like. After his appeal was rejected for the second time, the user appealed to the board.

The board says it chose this case to investigate the enforcement of Meta’s content moderation policies and practices on political content on threads. This is a timely move, considering that it is an election year and Meta has announced It will not actively recommend political content On Instagram or threads.

The board case will be the first involving threads, but it won’t be the last. The organization is already preparing to announce another set of cases tomorrow focused on criminal charges based on nationality. These latter cases were referred to the Board by Meta, but the Board would also receive and consider appeals from Threads users, as it did with the case involving Prime Minister Kishida.

Decisions made by the board will impact how Threads as a platform maintains the ability of users to express themselves freely on its platform, or whether Threads polices content more closely than Twitter/X. Will moderate from. This will ultimately help shape public opinion about the platform and influence users to choose one or the other, or perhaps a startup is experimenting with new ways to moderate content in a more personalized fashion.