Meta’s Oversight Board Raises Eyebrows As Annual Report Shows It Issued Just 53 Decisions Out Of 398,597 Appeals
Meta’s Oversight Board just rolled out its yearly report and the results are shocking, to say the least.
The Board which is known for issuing decisions based on the appeals it receives has left a lot of critics stunned. Figures proved how 53 decisions were made out of a whopping 398,597 appeals received.
Most of these appeals arose from users of the Facebook app and the fact that just a tiny fraction of those were addressed has left people scratching their heads.
The board suggested how case selection is pivotal here and therefore can result in a mega impact on the company’s users. For instance, it was seen adding credit to its rulings for enhancing support for the strike system and feature dubbed account status. The latter has to do with providing users with assistance when they are clueless as to how or why their posts were flagged for violations of the firm’s regulations.
More details were related to how it sent 266 recommendations to Facebook’s parent firm between 2021 to 2024. But out of those, it just managed to implement 75 and deemed progress across 81 of those.
So what happens to the rest, if you may ask? Well, the company referred to it as declined or reframed while some were implemented but a lack of transparency was provided to the board on that front. Shockingly, some are still pending.
As you can see, these figures are raising serious queries concerning how much change the tech giant is willing to make after analyzing what the board suggests. After all, it was designed for this reason only.
While the report failed to provide criticism for tech giant Meta and gave no insights about the company’s own efforts in terms of compliance with regulations, it did report a few cases.
This includes a recommendation provided to Meta for suspension of the account belonging to the former PM of Cambodia. They overturned Meta’s decision to leave a video on the app that might have led to a surge in violence. However, no mention of the decision taken by Meta after that was revealed. So we still don’t know if they ended up taking the board’s recommendations or not.
There is similarly some mention of debatable topics in the future that the board will engage upon and add their rulings to. Amongst those include the topic of shadowbans where some users feel Meta’s app intentionally punishes some people without any clear justification of why it was doing so.
There is no mention as to what or how that case will go and how they plan on tackling the issue that has been debated quite frequently.
In most cases, it makes decisions by weighing in on the evidence at hand but in this case, it just might make use of other means for tackling such matters. Did we mention how the topic related to the Israel-Hamas war is still hanging as many feel publishing content in this regard gets them shadow-banned and therefore are now looking to the board for some assistance on this front.
Image: DIW-Aigen
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