Oversight Board says to restore Facebook post comparing Russians to Nazis

Meta’s independent Oversight Board announced Wednesday it has overturned the social media giant’s decision earlier this year to remove a Facebook post that likened Russian soldiers who invaded Ukraine to Nazis. The Oversight Board said the Facebook post — which included the image of what appeared to be a dead body and quoted a poem calling for the killing of fascists — did not violate the company’s content rules or its responsibility to protect human rights.

“In this context, neither Meta’s human rights responsibilities nor its Hate Speech

Community Standard protect soldiers from claims of egregious wrongdoing or prevent provocative comparisons between their actions and past events,” the board wrote in its ruling. The ruling represented a rare rebuke by the Oversight Board, a group of academics, experts and lawyers who oversee Meta’s content moderation decisions, of the company’s ongoing response to a flood of posts on its social media networks about the war in Ukraine. The Oversight Board previously expressed interest in weighing in on the company’s evolving policies regarding content about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but was rebuffed.