Meta’s oversight board said on Tuesday that the social media company erred in removing two videos depicting hostages and injured people in the Israel-Hamas conflict, saying the videos were valuable to understanding human suffering in the war. Meta had already reinstated the videos when the oversight board took up the case.
One of the cases concerned a video posted on Instagram, which showed the aftermath of an airstrike near Al Shifa hospital in Gaza, including children who appeared injured or dead. The second case involved a video on Facebook of the 7 October attack, which showed an Israeli woman begging her kidnappers not to kill her as she is taken hostage. The board described the videos as important for “informing the world about human suffering on both sides”. Meta’s automatic moderation systems removed the content.
In both instances, after the oversight board selected the content takedowns for review, Meta reversed its decision and restored the videos with a screen that warned viewers before viewing, the board said.
The board said it approved of the move to restore the content, but disagreed with Meta’s decision to restrict the videos from being recommended to users, and in a statement urged Meta to “respond more quickly to changing circumstances on the ground, which affect the balance between the values of voice and safety”.
The board said such videos could contain evidence of human rights violations and could be important to the historical record of the war. It advised the company to err on the side of allowing such videos instead of algorithmically removing them, a process board members said raised the chances of cutting “valuable posts”.
A Meta spokesperson said the company welcomed the board’s decisions, adding no further action would be taken on the cases since the board did not make any policy recommendations.
The videos about the conflict are the first time that the oversight board, an independent body that reviews content decisions on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, examined cases on an expedited basis. Its process normally spans 90 days, but this verdict took 12. The board announced the faster review process earlier this year to respond more quickly to urgent events.
Since Hamas’s attack in Israel on 7 October, social media platforms have seen renewed scrutiny over their content moderation practices due to a surge in misinformation and accusations that the companies had penalized pro-Palestinian posts. The board said it has seen a nearly threefold increase in content removal appeals in the Middle East and North Africa. The debate over moderation has spread beyond the social networks themselves. Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) penned a stinging letter to the company demanding the company provide a fuller picture as to why users had reported uneven moderation and censorship of pro-Palestine content.
