Meta Oversight Board to users: How should we ban accounts?

You may think of Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, as an autocracy governed by founder Mark Zuckerberg. Given his shares give him a majority (60 percent) of any shareholder vote, that’s not far off the mark (pun not intended). Zuckerberg is CEO for life, or at least as long as he wants to be.

But there is at least one entity within Meta, independently financed, that has accumulated enough soft power to keep Zuckerberg in line a majority of the time: The Meta Oversight Board. Zuckerberg once described it as a “Supreme Court” for Facebook, and in its five years of life it has come out against Meta’s cross-check program, which the company mostly amended, slammed its content moderation, gave whistleblower Frances Haugen a hearing, and done all this while improving its attention to basic human rights.

“Although Meta is not legally required to implement every recommendation,” the Board noted in a report on its first five years, “it has implemented 75% of the more than 300 we have issued.” The company is required to respond to all board recommendations, at least, within 60 days.

All of which explains why the Oversight Board’s latest case actually matters, when it comes to Meta accounts and permanent bans — and why it’s so keen on your input.

The case, which the Board announced it would take on Tuesday, concerns an unnamed but “widely followed” Instagram account that was permanently banned in 2025, and is appealing the decision. The account’s posts included “visual threats of violence and harassment against a female journalist,” the board says, as well as “anti-gay slurs against prominent politicians and content depicting a sex act, alleging misconduct against minorities.”

This marks the first time that the Oversight Board has looked at an account banned for targeting public figures. (It previously upheld Donald Trump’s suspension in Jan. 2021, but that was for supporting violence at the Capitol insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. In that case, the Board also said Facebook couldn’t ban Trump indefinitely — it had to be permanent, or time-limited. Zuckerberg chose the latter.)

Unlike the actual U.S. Supreme Court, the Meta Oversight Board is very clear about why it chose to take on the case: To establish a precedent for other account ban appeals to follow.

The Instagram ban “represents a significant opportunity to provide users with greater transparency on Meta’s account enforcement policies and practices, and make recommendations for improvement,” the Board wrote.

What recommendations? Well, that’s where you come in. The Meta Oversight Board has already received more than 11,000 public comments in its first five years of cases, and now it’s actively soliciting more. Specifically, the board says it would love it if you could “contribute valuable perspectives” on:

• How best to ensure due process and fairness to people whose accounts are penalized or permanently disabled.

• The effectiveness of measures used by social media platforms to protect public figures and journalists from accounts engaged in repeated abuse and threats of violence, in particular against women in the public eye.

• Challenges in identifying and considering off-platform context when assessing threats against public figures and journalists.

• Research into the efficacy of punitive measures to shape online behaviors, and the efficacy of alternative or complementary interventions.

• Good industry practices in transparency reporting on account enforcement decisions and related appeals.

Got ideas? Then you have until Feb. 3 to leave your comment here — anonymously, if you wish. Zuckerberg will be watching closely, given that Meta referred this case to the Board in the first place. For the average Facebook or Instagram user, this may be as close as you get to influencing the supreme autocrat of social media.