In Facebook jail? Do not pass go

June 12, 2023

By Kim Komando

Have you ever been thrown into Facebook jail? Look at Twitter or Reddit and it seems like just about anything (or nothing at all) can get you banned.

Enter the Oversight Board. This is Meta’s oversight board that checks Facebook and Instagram’s content moderation decisions. Last year it received almost 1.3 million appeals. That’s an appeal every 24 seconds! 

Most of those appeals are about alleged violations of two community standards: violence/incitement and hate speech.

Like the Supreme Court

But for social media. Gizmodo got its proverbial hands on Meta’s 2022 report containing all this info. Some highlights: 

• 92% of appeals were from people asking to get their accounts or content restored.
• 45% came from the U.S. and Canada. No surprise, given those are some of the biggest user bases.

They must have made a lot of decisions, right?

Uh, oh. Despite 1,290,942 appeals, the Oversight Board only made a handful of decisions. They published the results of 12 and overturned Meta’s decision 75% of the time. In another 32 cases, Meta said its own decision was incorrect, so they never made it to the Board.

If you’ve been banned from FB or IG, the Oversight Board will probably say, “Too bad, so sad.” You can appeal their decision here. But good luck with that.