Posts Displaying South Africa’s Apartheid-Era Flag

UPDATED

OCT 8, 2024

2025-001-FB-UA, 2025-002-FB-UA

Today, October 8, 2024, the Oversight Board selected a case bundle appealed by Facebook users regarding posts that include depictions of the flag used by South Africa between 1928 and 1994.

The first piece of content is a photograph of a uniformed soldier carrying the flag with a caption that says “Share if you served under this flag.” The second piece of content is an album of 6 photographs – one of which is the flag. The other photographs include a black ice cream vendor riding a bicycle and selling to white children, a beach, a game board, candy cigarettes, and a toy “cracker” gun. The caption expresses fondness for the previous era and asks the audience to “read between the lines,” followed by a winking face and an “OK” hand emoji.

Meta determined that each of the two pieces of content did not violate our policies on Dangerous Organizations and Individuals or Hate Speech, as laid out in the Facebook Community Standards, and left the content up.

We will implement the Board’s decision once it has finished deliberating, and we will update this post accordingly. Please see the board’s website for the decision when they issue it.