Facebook oversight board announces first round of decisions

On Thursday, Facebook's content oversight board announced its first round of decisions, making rulings on five cases that involve hate speech, incitement of violence and other censorship topics pertaining to the social media network. The board overturned four of Facebook's content moderation decisions, calling for the posts to be restored, and upheld one.

This is the first time Facebook has been overruled on a content decision by the independent judgement of the oversight board. The independent board was established last year to make the final call on some of Facebook's most difficult content decisions. It chose its first slate of cases for review in December, selecting six from more than 20,000 brought to the board since its began functioning in October 2020.

Responding to the decision of the oversight board, Monika Bickert, Vice President, Content Policy said, "Since we just received the board’s decisions a short time ago, we will need time to understand the full impact of their decisions. We will update the Newsroom posts about each case within 30 days to explain how we have considered the policy recommendations, including whether we will put them through our policy development process."