Oversight Board Calls For Meta To Revisit Its Covid Misinformation Policies

In response to a request from Meta, the Oversight Board has issued its recommendations on how the company handles health-related misinformation, saying it needs to adopt more rigorous scrutiny.

While Meta removed 27 million pieces of Covid-19 misinformation from Facebook and Instagram between March 2020 and July 2022 – 1.3 million of which were restored through appeal – the board says it should implement a more rigorous and broader review process.

It wants the company to commission an assessment into how its recommendation algorithms, newsfeed and other features have amplified harmful health information, and to look at whether groups which are susceptible to misinformation were targeted by Meta’s design choices.

It is also calling for the company to do more to support independent research by allowing greater access to information which is not in the public domain.

“Meta should listen to a range of voices on this – including dissenting voices – to ensure the right to freedom of expression is protected online and to make sure we don’t default to removing more content than is necessary. Such a measured approach can avoid opening the floodgates to harmful content without knowing who it will reach and the impact it might have,” says Thomas Hughes, director of the Oversight Board.

“We are concerned that Meta has shown no evidence that it has considered the human rights impact its algorithms and amplification have had on harmful health misinformation.”

As long as the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to declare COVID-19 as an international public health emergency, says the board, Meta should continue to remove Covid misinformation that is likely to directly contribute to the risk of imminent and significant physical harm.

But it appears to be calling for a slightly more relaxed interpretation of the rules, by introducing a more diverse stakeholder consultation process to ‘include a mechanism for dissenting views to be heard’. These views, it says, should include dissenting voices in the scientific community, as well as experts on freedom of expression, to prevent debate on public health issues being stifled.

In terms of enforcement, the board has concluded that many of the measures Meta takes short of content removal are inadequate or ill-suited for containing Covid misinformation that could cause imminent and substantial physical harm.

And fact-checking by third parties, it says, has failed to adequately address the vast majority of content flagged for review – particularly with content from political leaders exempt from fact-checking.

Meanwhile, while Meta currently has a global policy on Covid misinformation, the Oversight Board believes that as the pandemic fades away this should be changed to a more localized approach.

“At the start of the pandemic measures were required to keep people safe online as well as offline,” says Hughes.

“But as the pandemic has evolved and restrictions have eased in the offline world, it’s in all our interests to ensure that the online world catches up.”

The Oversight Board has made 18 recommendations in all – they aren’t binding, but Meta is required to respond to each one within 60 days. A Meta spokesperson comments: “We thank the Oversight Board for its review and recommendations in this case. As Covid-19 evolves, we will continue consulting extensively with experts on the most effective ways to help people stay safe on our platforms.”