Facebook ‘Supreme Court’ Orders Social Network To Restore 4 Posts In First Rulings
Facebook created the panel of experts to review the hardest calls the social network makes about what it does and does not allow users to post.
Jeff Chiu/AP
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Jeff Chiu/AP
Facebook created the panel of experts to review the hardest calls the social network makes about what it does and does not allow users to post.
Jeff Chiu/AP
Updated at 3:16 p.m. ET
Facebook’s oversight board on Thursday directed the company to restore several posts that the social network had removed for breaking its rules on hate speech, harmful misinformation and other matters.
The decisions are the first rulings for the board, which Facebook created last year as a kind of supreme court, casting the final votes on the hardest calls the company makes about what it does and does not allow users to post.
The rulings announced on Thursday do not include the most high-profile and high-stakes case on the board’s docket: Facebook’s suspension of former President Donald Trump from both its namesake platform and Instagram, which the company owns. Facebook banned Trump earlier this month, after a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
The Trump case, which the board has 90 days to consider since receiving it last week, is seen as a crucial test of the panel’s legitimacy. The board will begin taking public comment on it on Friday.
Still, Thursday’s decisions are an important first glimpse into how the board sees its governance role and indicated skepticism among members with how Facebook has communicated and enforced several key policies.
“We believe the board has the ability to provide a critical independent check on how Facebook moderates content and to begin reshaping the company’s policies over the long term,” Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a former prime minister of Denmark who is one of the board’s four co-chairs, told reporters on a press call on Thursday.
In its first batch of decisions, the board overturned Facebook’s post removals in four of five cases:
- It overruled Facebook’s removal of a post from a user in France criticizing the government for withholding an alleged “cure” for COVID-19. Facebook had removed the post because it said it could lead to imminent harm, but the board said the user’s comments were directed at opposing government policy. “Facebook had not demonstrated the post would rise to the level of imminent harm, as required by its own rule in the Community Standards,” the board said. It also recommended that the company create a new policy specifically about health misinformation, “consolidating and clarifying the existing rules in one place.”
- It overruled a case in which Facebook took down a post from a user in North America allegedly quoting Joseph Goebbels, a Nazi official on Facebook’s list of “dangerous individuals.” The board found it “was a criticism, not a celebration of the attitude exemplified by the alleged Goebbels quote,” board co-chair Michael McConnell, director of Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law Center, told reporters.
- In a case dealing with nudity, the board overturned the removal of an Instagram post promoting breast cancer awareness in Brazil that showed women’s nipples. The board pointed out that Facebook’s nudity rules include an exception for posts about breast cancer. Facebook restored the post back in December, after the board announced it would be reviewing the case.
- “I think this is a really good example of how the mere prospect of a board review has already begun to alter how Facebook acts,” McConnell said.
The board also sounded the alarm that the Instagram post was initially removed by automated systems. “The incorrect removal of this post indicates the lack of proper human oversight which raises human rights concerns,” it said in its decision. It recommended that Facebook tell users when their posts have been taken down by automated systems and that they can appeal those decisions to a person.
- The final two cases dealt with hate speech. In the first, the board overruled the removal of a post from a Facebook user in Myanmar that Facebook said violated its rules against hate speech for disparaging Muslims as psychologically inferior. While the board found the post “pejorative,” taking into account the full context, it did not “advocate hatred or intentionally incite any form of imminent harm,” the board said in its decision.
The board acknowledged the case was fraught because Facebook has been criticized for its role in the genocide of the country’s Muslim minority.
Muslim Advocates, a civil rights group, slammed the ruling. “Facebook’s Oversight Board bent over backwards to excuse hate in Myanmar — a country where Facebook has been complicit in a genocide against Muslims,” said Eric Naing, a spokesperson for the group. “Instead of taking meaningful action to curb dangerous hate speech on the platform, Facebook punted responsibility to a third party board that used laughable technicalities to protect anti-Muslim hate content that contributes to genocide.”
- The board upheld Facebook’s removal of another post for breaking hate-speech rules, however. It said the company was right to remove a post that used a slur against Azerbaijanis. “The context in which the term was used makes clear it was meant to dehumanize its target,” the board said in its decision.
Facebook has said it will abide by the board’s decisions and has already reinstated the posts the board said shouldn’t have come down.
The board also issued recommendations that Facebook be more transparent, including explaining to users whose posts are removed which rules they had violated and giving more clarity and definitions for issues including health misinformation and dangerous individuals. Facebook has 30 days to respond to the board.
“We believe that the board included some important suggestions that we will take to heart. Their recommendations will have a lasting impact on how we structure our policies,” Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of content policy, said in a blog post.
Evelyn Douek, a Harvard Law School lecturer who studies online content moderation, said the board’s inaugural rulings “are a true shot across the bow” because they take aim not just at Facebook’s handling of individual posts but at its broader policies and enforcement.
“Now the question is, how seriously will Facebook take those recommendations and how openly will it engage with what the board said?” Douek said.
The board is funded by Facebook through an independent trust, and made up of 20 experts around the world. They include specialists in law and human rights, a Nobel Peace laureate from Yemen, the vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute and several former journalists.
Each case was reviewed by a group of five randomly selected members, with the final decision approved by the full board.
Editor’s note: Facebook is among NPR’s financial supporters.
Today, we are releasing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0. As part of this release, we are highlighting changes below that we believe are relevant to parts of our developer community. These changes include announcements, product updates, and notifications on deprecations that we believe are relevant to your application(s)’ integration with our platform.
For a complete list of all changes and their details, please visit our changelog.
General Updates
Consolidation of Audience Location Status Options for Location Targeting
As previously announced in May 2023, we have consolidated Audience Location Status to our current default option of “People living in or recently in this location” when choosing the type of audience to reach within their Location Targeting selections. This update reflects a consolidation of other previously available options and removal of our “People traveling in this location” option.
We are making this change as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver more value to businesses, simplify our ads system, and streamline our targeting options in order to increase performance efficiency and remove options that have low usage.
This update will apply to new or duplicated campaigns. Existing campaigns created prior to launch will not be entered in this new experience unless they are in draft mode or duplicated.
Add “add_security_recommendation” and “code_expiration_minutes” to WA Message Templates API
Earlier this year, we released WhatsApp’s authentication solution which enabled creating and sending authentication templates with native buttons and preset authentication messages. With the release of Graph API v18, we’re making improvements to the retrieval of authentication templates, making the end-to-end authentication template process easier for BSPs and businesses.
With Graph API v18, BSPs and businesses can have better visibility into preset authentication message template content after creation. Specifically, payloads will return preset content configuration options, in addition to the text used by WhatsApp. This improvement can enable BSPs and businesses to build “edit” UIs for authentication templates that can be constructed on top of the API.
Note that errors may occur when upgrading to Graph API v18 if BSPs or businesses are taking the entire response from the GET request and providing it back to the POST request to update templates. To resolve, the body/header/footer text fields should be dropped before passing back into the API.
Re-launching dev docs and changelogs for creating Call Ads
- Facebook Reels Placement for Call Ads
Meta is releasing the ability to deliver Call Ads through the Facebook Reels platform. Call ads allow users to call businesses in the moment of consideration when they view an ad, and help businesses drive more complex discussions with interested users. This is an opportunity for businesses to advertise with call ads based on peoples’ real-time behavior on Facebook. Under the Ad set Level within Ads Manager, businesses can choose to add “Facebook Reels” Under the Placements section. - Re-Launching Call Ads via API
On September 12, 2023, we’re providing updated guidance on how to create Call Ads via the API. We are introducing documentation solely for Call Ads, so that 3P developers can more easily create Call Ads’ campaigns and know how to view insights about their ongoing call ad campaigns, including call-related metrics. In the future, we also plan to support Call Add-ons via our API platform. Developers should have access to the general permissions necessary to create general ads in order to create Call Ads via the API platform.Please refer to developer documentation for additional information.
Deprecations & Breaking Changes
Graph API changes for user granular permission feature
We are updating two graph API endpoints for WhatsAppBusinessAccount. These endpoints are as follows:
- Retrieve message templates associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
- Retrieve phone numbers associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
With v18, we are rolling out a new feature “user granular permission”. All existing users who are already added to WhatsAppBusinessAccount will be backfilled and will continue to have access (no impact).
The admin has the flexibility to change these permissions. If the admin changes the permission and removes access to view message templates or phone numbers for one of their users, that specific user will start getting an error message saying you do not have permission to view message templates or phone numbers on all versions v18 and older.
Deprecate legacy metrics naming for IG Media and User Insights
Starting on September 12, Instagram will remove duplicative and legacy, insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API in order to share a single source of metrics to our developers.
This new upgrade reduces any confusion as well as increases the reliability and quality of our reporting.
After 90 days of this launch (i.e. December 11, 2023), we will remove all these duplicative and legacy insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API on all versions in order to be more consistent with the Instagram app.
We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received from our developer community, and look forward to continuing to work together.
Please review the media insights and user insights developer documentation to learn more.
Deprecate all Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 endpoints
Facebook Wi-Fi was designed to improve the experience of connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots at businesses. It allowed a merchant’s customers to get free Wi-Fi simply by checking in on Facebook. It also allowed merchants to control who could use their Wi-Fi and for how long, and integrated with ads to enable targeting to customers who had used the merchant’s Wi-Fi. This product was deprecated on June 12, 2023. As the partner notice period has ended, all endpoints used by Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 have been deprecated and removed.
API Version Deprecations:
As part of Facebook’s versioning schedule for Graph API and Marketing API, please note the upcoming deprecations:
Graph API
- September 14, 2023: Graph API v11.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 8, 2024: Graph API v12.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- May 28, 2024: Graph API v13.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
Marketing API
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v14.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v15.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 06, 2024: Marketing API v16.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
To avoid disruption to your business, we recommend migrating all calls to the latest API version that launched today.
Facebook Platform SDK
As part of our 2-year deprecation schedule for Platform SDKs, please note the upcoming deprecations and sunsets:
- October 2023: Facebook Platform SDK v11.0 or below will be sunset
- February 2024: Facebook Platform SDK v12.0 or below will be sunset
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Before today (August 28, 2023), advertisers could not promote images and/or videos used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API. This process created unwanted friction for our partners and their customers.
After consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and/or video media used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API as of August 28, 2023.
We appreciate all the feedback received from our developer community, and hope to continue improving your experience.
Please review the developer documentation to learn more.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Launching second release of Facebook Reels API: An enterprise solution for desktop and web publishers
We’re excited to announce that the second release of FB Reels API is now publicly available for third-party developers. FB Reels API enables users of third-party platforms to share Reels directly to public Facebook Pages and the New Pages Experience.
FB Reels API has grown significantly since the first release in September 2022. The new version of the APIs now support custom thumbnails, automatic music tagging, tagging collaborators, longer format of reels and better error handling.
FB Reels API will also support scheduling and draft capability to allow creators to take advantage of tools provided either by Meta or by our partners. Based on the feedback we received from our partners, we’ll now provide additional audio insights via the Audio Recommendations API and reels performance metrics via the Insights API.
Our goal in the next couple of releases is to continue to make it easier for creators to develop quality content by adding features like early copyright detection and A/B testing. We’re also excited to start working on enhanced creation features like Video clipping- so stay tuned to hear more about those features in the future.
Call-to-Action
If you are a developer interested in integrating with the Facebook Reels API, please refer to the Developer Documents for more info.
Not sure if this product is for you? Check out our entire suite of sharing offerings.
Tune in to Product @scale event to learn more about FB Video APIs and hear from some of our customers.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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