Meta’s Oversight Board said the company's content moderation failures led to the removal of “No Kings” political activist accounts in the US and others focused on the Brazilian elections from several of its platforms.
The so-called No Kings protests oppose some of President Donald Trump's policies and executive actions. Brazil's contentious election process has pitted current President Luiz Inacio 'Lula' da Silva against Flavio Bolsonaro, one of former leader Jair Bolsonaro's sons.
“We have repeatedly warned that during elections and periods of heightened political tension, Meta's content moderation failures often manifest themselves in two ways: overenforcement that suppresses political speech and underenforcement that undermines electoral integrity,” said the Oversight Board, which provides independent guidance and critiques of the company's actions.
The board said No Kings accounts should have featured in the company's cross-check programme, which would then have probably prevented the technical error from occurring.
“It remains unclear why Meta’s election integrity efforts did not lead to a much quicker resolution,” the board wrote.
Last weekend, with nationwide No Kings protests scheduled to take place, the activists' social media accounts on Meta were removed.
Meta blamed the removal on a series of technological glitches but critics say No Kings content was suppressed.
Mr da Silva's team has said his profile was intentionally hidden from searches on purpose. Brazil’s top electoral court this week doubled a daily fine for Meta, saying it had failed to comply with an order about how political content is shown on its platforms.
“It’s clear that Meta must do more to ensure that its enforcement practices during elections are transparent and consistent, and that political speech is protected rather than stifled,” the board statement read.
Created in 2018, the board is designed to provide independent supervision of Meta's content moderation on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, particularly once users feel they have exhausted the company’s appeals processes.
The board was created largely as a response to the deluge of inauthentic content originating from Russia that appeared in users' news feeds in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election.
Such content led to a number of congressional investigations and Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, giving evidence at a hearing in Washington.
Meta announced last year it would be automating its content moderation approach.
“Our engineering team discovered that the spike that triggered the incorrect enforcement was primarily in the account’s 'reading' behaviour,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone posted on Threads of the current incident.
“Unfortunately, that automated action was clearly taken in error. Everything is now working as it should and we sincerely apologise.”
But Meta's response has done little to calm critics.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy suggested that if the Democrats win back the House and Senate in the midterm elections, Big Tech companies such as Meta would come under increased scrutiny.
“Outrageous,” he posted on X, referring to the deactivation of the No Kings accounts. “Put this on the January investigation list.”
