12 days before election, Meta oversight board frets about political speech moderation

With 12 full days left until the 2024 U.S. presidential election, there are still concerns about if Meta can properly moderate political content on its platforms.Two months ago, a Facebook user put the faces of presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz on top of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels’ characters in the Dumb and Dumber movie poster. The poster features Carrey and Daniels’ characters grabbing each other’s nipples — you know the one. The user then captioned it with the emojis “🤷‍♂️🖕🖕.” SEE ALSO: X hiring content moderators for a new ‘Trust and Safety’ center in Austin Meta removed the post because it went against the platform’s Bullying and Harassment Community Standard, specifically because that standard doesn’t allow “derogatory sexualized photoshop or drawings.” The user appealed Meta’s decision, which moved the decision up to Meta’s Oversight Board. After that, Meta “determined its removal was incorrect, restoring the post to Facebook.”Meta’s oversight board is a group with more than 20 members, including academics, policymakers, and journalists, and this group makes content moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram. The board wrote that Meta’s handling of this post gives them “serious concerns” about Meta’s ability to moderate political content on its platforms.”This post is nothing more than a commonplace satirical image of prominent politicians and is instantly recognizable as such,” the board wrote. It continued: In the context of elections, the Board has previously recommended that Meta should develop a framework for evaluating its election integrity…12 days before election, Meta oversight board frets about political speech moderation