Facebook oversight board criticizes how it handled rules on contentious content

fb "out of place" steering on an important exemption to its rules on dangerous people and organizations for 3 years, the enterprise's independent oversight board stated on Thursday.

The board, which was created via the corporation to rule on a small slice of contentious content decisions, stated it had overturned facebook's unique elimination of an Instagram post encouraging humans to talk approximately the solitary confinement of Abdullah Ocalan, a founding member of the Kurdistan people' birthday celebration (PKK).

It stated the content should never were eliminated, but it additionally said that when it selected the case, facebook found a relevant piece of its internal regulations had "inadvertently now not transferred" to a new review gadget in 2018.

This steerage made an exception to fb's regulations, which limit help or praise of people or corporations it designates as risky, to allow dialogue on the situations of confinement.

facebook has lengthy been underneath scrutiny over what is allowed on its platforms and has been criticized with the aid of the board for a lack of transparency round its guidelines. The board said it turned into "concerned" that facebook had misplaced an critical policy exemption for this time and that this can have brought about different posts being wrongly taken down.

It stated the steerage, which changed into now not shared with fb's policy group, was developed in 2017 in part in response to worries approximately the situations of Ocalan's imprisonment.

A agency spokeswoman declined to answer Reuters questions about how the policy become misplaced. The board stated facebook changed into accomplishing a evaluation of how it failed to switch the steering but stated it became no longer "technically feasible" to decide what number of pieces of content have been taken down while the guidance changed into no longer available. fb had restored the content before the board's choice.

The board has advocated facebook post the results of its assessment, along with descriptions of some other misplaced policies.