Social networking platforms should provide clear, consistent rules for when they will ban accounts permanently and provide affected users with information and avenues for appeal, Meta’s independent Oversight Board said Thursday.
The board — often referred to as the “supreme court” for the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram — made the recommendations as part of a review of a permanent ban issued to an Instagram account that threatened a journalist.
“Meta was correct to permanently disable the account because of… severe threats of violence” including posting pictures of the woman journalist with a bullseye superimposed over her face, the board said.
But “the case raises concerns over due process and proportionality regarding account governance and the clarity of Meta’s rules,” it added.
Made up of prominent figures from academia, media and civil society, the Oversight Board is a last resort for punished or banned Meta users, examining the company’s compliance with its own policies and global human rights standards.
The members have received over 750 formal comments on Thursday’s case, as well as “innumerable complaints from Meta users… who have lost access to their accounts,” the board wrote, adding that they were “concerned by the volume and urgency of these requests”.
Being permanently banned from a social network can cut off vital real-world contacts, and “users forcefully expressed how losing their accounts harmed their social lives, mental health or financial wellbeing,” it added.
Illustrating its concerns using the case of the account barred for threatening the journalist, the board argued that Meta should have acted sooner to protect both her safety and the rights of the account involved.
“Had Meta reacted to his violations sooner, the account holder may have had more opportunities to understand the nature of his wrongdoing and correct his behaviour,” they said.
The board highlighted that Meta’s policies on account restrictions or bans in response to misbehaviour are scattered across multiple pages and sometimes contradict one another.
Users need clear information and moderators a more consistent set of policies to enforce that nevertheless offers flexibility for edge cases, they said.
Even banned users should be provided with information about what rule they violated and a clear history of enforcement actions, the board said.
This was particularly important in cases where people had been wrongfully accused of breaking the rules, had their accounts hijacked or been punished for interacting with content that was not itself punished by Meta.
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