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Civil society groups urge Meta’s Oversight Board to resign in protest

Meta’s Oversight Board is coming under new pressure to respond to the company’s recent policy changes on fact-checking and moderation, which were made without input from the advisory group. A coalition of civil society organizations has published an open letter to the Oversight Board saying the group should resign en masse as “recent developments make it clear that the company has abandoned any pretense of oversight and acts with no regard as to the consequences.”
The letter, which was first reported by The Washington Post, comes from the Global Coalition for Tech Justice, which is made up of more than 250 human and digital rights advocates, fact-checking organizations and other civil society groups from around the world.
“A mass resignation would be a historic act of conscience — one that makes clear Meta’s reckless disregard for human rights cannot be excused, ignored, or concealed behind the curtains of an oversight board that has no real power,” the letter says. “By stepping down collectively, you would show solidarity with all those communities impacted by Meta’s unconscionable actions, increase public pressure on Meta and demonstrate that true accountability cannot exist within a system designed to suppress it.”
Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would end its long-running fact-checking programs and roll back content moderation standards that protected immigrants and LGBT people on its platform. The Meta CEO, who upon creating the board said that “Facebook should not make so many important decisions about free expression and safety on our own,” reportedly decided to make the changes following a visit with then President-elect Donald Trump last year and consulted only a “handful” of people at Meta.
The Oversight Board’s co-chair later said that these changes came as a “surprise” to the group, which was created to help shape platform-wide policy but was not consulted ahead of time in this instance.
The Global Coalition for Tech Justice isn’t the first group to question the Oversight Board’s role in the wake of Zuckerberg’s sweeping policy changes. Members of Congress also recently raised the issue in a letter addressed to the Meta CEO. “The Oversight Board, once touted as a beacon of accountability, is rendered toothless when Meta itself refuses to adhere to the principles of ‘trust and safety,’” they wrote.
One member of the Global Coalition for Tech Justice has been even more direct. “If the Oversight Board has no role (even consultory) in the single biggest change in content moderation since their founding, clearly the experiment has failed,” the “Real Facebook Oversight Board,” a group of longtime Oversight Board critics, said in a statement last month.
Meanwhile, the Oversight Board’s response to Meta’s changes has so far been muted. The group published a statement shortly after Zuckerberg’s announcement, saying that it would “engage with Meta” on its plan to implement community notes. It later added a brief update that said it would be “reviewing the implications of the various changes” that go “beyond fact-checking.”
Representatives for Meta and the Oversight Board didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement to The Washington Post, the board said that it planned to propose “nuanced policy recommendations that Meta must respond to.”This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/civil-society-groups-urge-metas-oversight-board-to-resign-in-protest-211134922.html?src=rss