Now, Instagram Threads, the company’s newest platform, is part of the oversight board’s purview. Originally intended to serve as an impartial appeals body, the board has already rendered rulings on issues like the removal of breast cancer images, the COVID-19 hoax, and the ban of Donald Trump on Facebook.
The board is now considering issues related to Threads, Meta’s Twitter/X rival.
This sets Threads apart from competitors like X, where Elon Musk and other users mostly rely on Community Notes’ crowdsourced fact-checks to augment its otherwise lacklustre moderation. Furthermore, it differs significantly from the moderating tasks handled by decentralised systems such as Bluesky and Mastodon on their respective apps. Decentralisation allows community members to create their own servers with their own set of moderation policies and choose to de-federate from other servers whose material violates their policies. 
Additionally, the business Bluesky provides funding for stackable moderation, which allows community members to build and operate their own moderation services that can be combined with others to provide a unique experience for every user.
The answer to Meta’s centralised power and control over content filtering was supposed to be found in the business’s choice to hand over challenging decisions to an independent board that might veto the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and the firm. However, as these entrepreneurs have shown, there are alternative approaches to doing this that give the consumer more control over what they view without violating the rights of others to do the same.
On Thursday, nonetheless, the Oversight Board said that Threads would be the first case it would consider.
In this instance, a user responded to a post that included a screenshot of a news item in which Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida criticised his party for allegedly underreporting fundraising income. The picture also had a commentary that called him out for tax cheating and used disparaging language, including the words “drop dead.” It also uses disparaging terms to describe someone who wears spectacles. Despite its resemblance to a typical X post, a human reviewer at Meta determined that the post violated the company’s Violence and Incitement regulation due to the inclusion of the phrase “drop dead” and the use of hashtags advocating for death. After receiving a second rejection, the user appealed to the board.
The Board claims it chose this case to look into Meta’s rules for content moderation and how it polices political material on threads. Given that it is election year and Meta stated that it would not deliberately suggest political material on Instagram or threads, this is a sensible move.
The lawsuit over the board’s threads will not be the last. The group is already preparing to reveal another set of cases tomorrow that focus on nationality-based criminal accusations. Meta submitted these later instances to the Board, as it did with the Prime Minister Kishida case, but the Board will also hear and consider appeals from Threads users.
The Board’s choices will determine whether Threads, as a platform, decides to protect users’ freedom of expression or whether it will censor material more strictly than Twitter/X. In the end, these decisions will shape the public’s perception of the platforms and influence consumers to select one over the other, or perhaps a startup exploring innovative methods for more personalised content management.
