Facebook has been “removing posts” that discussed dangerous people and organizations for three years, the company’s independent oversight committee said Thursday. The reason? It had not updated a part of its policy!
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The board, which the company created to rule on a small number of controversial post removal decisions, said it had reversed Facebook's initial removal of an Instagram post about the house arrest in Rome of Abdullah Ocalan, a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
The board said the content should not have been removed in the first place, and that Facebook found that a relevant part of its internal rules had “accidentally not been migrated” to a new review system created in 2018 – essentially forgetting about it.
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Facebook has long been under scrutiny for what is allowed on its platforms and has been criticized by its board for a lack of transparency about its rules. The board said it was “concerned” that Facebook had missed an important policy exception this time and that it could have led to other posts being removed that shouldn’t have been.
He said the rule, which was not shared with Facebook's policy team, was developed in 2017 in part in response to concerns about Ocalan's prison conditions.
A company spokesman declined to answer questions from Reuters about how the policy was lost. The board said Facebook conducted a review of how it failed to transfer the policy, but said simply that it was not “technically feasible.” Facebook had reinstated the content before the board’s decision.
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The board recommended that Facebook publish the results of its review, including descriptions of any other missing policies.
Information source: scmp.com
