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Empowering Political Speech During Protests
AGGIORNATO 19 FEB 2025
In the Iranian Protest Slogan case, the Oversight Board overturned Meta’s original decision to remove a Facebook post protesting the Iranian government, which contains the slogan “marg bar... Khamenei.” This literally translates as “death to Khamenei” but is often used as political rhetoric to mean “down with Khamenei.” The Board has made recommendations to better protect political speech in critical situations, such as that in Iran, where historic, widespread, protests are being violently suppressed. This includes permitting the general use of “marg bar Khamenei” during protests in Iran.
The Board recommended that Meta issue guidance to its reviewers that "marg bar Khamenei" statements in the context of protests in Iran do not violate the Violence and Incitement Community Standard. They also recommended that Meta should reverse any strikes and feature limits for wrongfully removed content that used the "marg bar Khamenei" slogan. In response, Meta agreed to full implementation.
What was the impact of Meta’s implementation of this recommendation?
Because the content in question was prevalent in public conversations, the Board was able to use Crowdtangle, Meta’s legacy Research tool, to evaluate implementation of the recommendation. The Board investigated whether there was a statistically significant difference in the number of posts present on Facebook and Instagram following implementation of the Board’s recommendation compared to before the Board’s decision. While the Board did not find statistically significant differences in the number of posts on Facebook groups and pages that were restored because of implementing the recommendation, they were able to find a statistically significant difference between the change in number of posts across the Instagram accounts. Specifically, they found approximately 30% more posts with the phrase “marg bar Khamenei” on Instagram after the Board’s decision, which we are unable to attribute to random chance.
