Oversight Board overrules Facebook

WASHINGTON • Facebook's new “Supreme Court” underscored the importance of free speech as it overturned the decision to remove four posts ahead of a key ruling on Donald Trump's suspension.

The social media company's new Oversight Board ruled that Facebook had been wrong to remove content in four out of the five cases before it. They included posts that Facebook took down for violating rules on hate speech and harmful COVID-19 misinformation.

The rulings, announced Thursday, are the first by the Oversight Board — an independent panel of 20 journalists, politicians and judges from across the globe — since it was set up last year as a Supreme Court-style body to have final say over content decisions.

Alan Rusbridger, one of the panel and the former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, described the panel's approach in an interview with NBC News.

“For all board members, you start with the supremacy of free speech,” he said. “Then you look at each case and say, what's the cause in this particular case why free speech should be curtailed?”

The board will now begin debating Facebook's decision to suspend Trump's page in the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol. A ruling is expected within 90 days. The former president will have the chance to argue his case directly to the Oversight Board if he wishes to regain access to the profile, which has 35-million followers.

In the rulings Thursday, the board concluded that Facebook wrongly removed a quote that was incorrectly attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi regime's chief propagandist. The board said that the post did not promote Nazi ideology but rather sought to criticize Goebbels and draw a comparison between Trump and the Nazi regime.

A post criticizing China's treatment of Uyghur Muslims that said “(there is) something wrong with Muslims psychologically” was also wrongly removed, the board found.

However, a decision to remove a post about tensions between Azerbaijanis and Armenians that contained a “demeaning slur” was upheld under Facebook's hate speech policy.

Another Facebook decision the board overturned was an Instagram post that included photos of breast cancer survivors that showed female nipples.

The board also overturned Facebook's decision in October to remove a post from a French Facebook user that criticized the French government's refusal to authorize hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment.

In its ruling, the board said Facebook “had not demonstrated the post would rise to the level of imminent harm.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has said the rulings would be “binding.”