The Emerging Normative System of Meta’s Oversight Board – An Introduction

Abstract

With the establishment of the Oversight Board, Meta has created one of the most prominent experiments in the world of online content moderation, with potentially great influence on how other social media platforms might react to the same and similar moderation challenges. With reactions to its first decisions ranging from very skeptical to great excitement, we set out to systematise the first two years of case decisions until July 2022 in order to understand how the Board interacts with its normative infrastructure and limitations. While gaining a greater understanding of how content moderation of some of the most important social media platforms work, we also use the Board as a case study in the field of legal pluralism. We find that the Board can promote transparency and function as a stage to hold Meta publicly accountable. It has further helped to nuance the oftentimes under-clarified standards Meta operates on and has set a clearer focus on international human rights norms, thereby arguably expanding its normative potential. Given its comparatively recent establishment and the limitations it was given by its mandate, it, however, remains to be seen how it continues to interact with Meta as well as its greater target audience. This systematization may thus help us better understand how such an accountability mechanism can function while being normatively limited.

Keywords: platform governance, content moderation, freedom of speech, Oversight Board, legal pluralism