Instagram accidentally banned a post criticizing solitary confinement because Facebook had misplaced the policy allowing it, according to a new Facebook Oversight Board (FOB) decision.<\/p>\n
The semi-independent Oversight Board says the Facebook-owned site should not have removed a post about Abdullah \u00d6calan, a founding member of the militant Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party (PKK). Facebook designates \u00d6calan and the PKK \u201cdangerous entities\u201d that users cannot support on its platforms. In January, moderators applied that policy to a message criticizing \u00d6calan\u2019s imprisonment and solitary confinement \u2014 a practice the United Nations has deemed a form of torture \u2014 in a Turkish prison.<\/p>\n
The user appealed to the Oversight Board, which agreed to examine the case. As it did, Facebook apparently \u201cfound that a piece of internal guidance on the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy was \u2018inadvertently not transferred\u2019 to a new review system in 2018.\u201d The policy had been developed in 2017 partly because of the debate over \u00d6calan\u2019s living conditions, and it \u201callows discussion on the conditions of confinement for individuals designated as dangerous.\u201d But the internal guidance was never made public to Facebook or Instagram users \u2014 and Facebook only realized it had dropped out of the moderation guidelines altogether when the user appealed.<\/p>\n \u201cHad the board not selected this case for review, the guidance would have remained unknown to content moderators, and a significant amount of expression in the public interest would have been removed,\u201d the FOB\u2019s decision states. Facebook declined to comment on whether it considers that assessment accurate.<\/p>\n \u201cThe board is concerned that specific guidance for moderators on an important policy exception was lost for three years,\u201d the FOB\u2019s decision continues. While Facebook restored the post about \u00d6calan in April, it told the board it was \u201cnot technically feasible\u201d to see how many other posts might have been removed because moderators weren\u2019t aware of the exception. \u201cThe Board believes that Facebook\u2019s mistake may have led to many other posts being wrongly removed and that Facebook\u2019s transparency reporting is not sufficient to assess whether this type of error reflects a systemic problem.\u201d<\/p>\n The FOB decision broadly pushes Facebook to make its rules more transparent. \u201cThis case demonstrates why public rules are important for users: they not only inform them of what is expected, but also empower them to point out Facebook\u2019s mistakes,\u201d it says. The decision says Facebook is conducting a review of how the policy failed to be transferred, and the FOB has offered a series of further, optional recommendations. They include conducting a review process to see if any other policies were lost, as well as publicly clarifying the limits of its ban on supporting \u201cdangerous individuals and organizations.\u201d<\/p>\n Social networks like Facebook and Instagram often keep parts of their policies secret, saying that releasing totally precise moderation rules lets trolls and other bad actors game the system. However, as the FOB notes, this kind of secrecy on a huge, diffuse service can make miscommunication easier \u2014 as it apparently did in this case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Instagram accidentally banned a post criticizing solitary confinement because Facebook had misplaced the policy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1525,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[38,64,62,66,63,65,69,67,71,68,70],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1524"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2001,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions\/2001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u201cThe Board is concerned that specific guidance for moderators … was lost for three years\u201d<\/q><\/aside>\n
\u201cThis case demonstrates why public rules are important for users\u201d<\/q><\/aside>\n