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2024-037-IG-MR
Today, June 4, 2024, the Oversight Board selected a case referred by Meta regarding a video posted to Instagram. The post is meant to advertise the services of a beauty salon and the video depicts a conversation between a beautician and a bride who states that she is 14 years old. The video includes a caption in Farsi which, when translated, claims that the story is “based on a real event” and is followed by advertising “consulting and tutorial services for brides.”
Meta took down this content for violating our Human Exploitation policy, as laid out in the Instagram Community Guidelines and Facebook Community Standards.
Meta referred this case to the board because we found it significant and difficult as it creates tension between our values of safety and voice.
While our policy does not explicitly prohibit support or praise for child marriage, it does explicitly prohibit content that “recruits people for, facilitates, or exploits people” through child marriage. The policy rationale notes that the goal of the Human Exploitation policy is to remove all forms of “exploitation of humans,” and we believe that this encompasses support for child marriage, particularly when the post may create a financial benefit for the user (in this case, the user is actively recruiting minors for paid services related to a wedding).
We will implement the board’s decision once it has finished deliberating, and will update this post accordingly. Please see the Board's website for the decision when they issue it.
Case decision
We welcome the Oversight Board’s decision today, October 10, 2024, on this case. The Board upheld Meta’s decision to remove the content from Instagram.
After conducting a review of the recommendations provided by the Board, we will update this post with initial responses to those recommendations.
Recommendations
Recommendation 1 (Implementing in Full)To ensure clarity for users, Meta should modify the Human Exploitation policy to explicitly state that forced marriages include child marriage.
The Board will consider this recommendation implemented when Meta updates its public-facing Human Exploitation Community Standard to reflect the change.
Our commitment: We are refining our Human Exploitation policy to explicitly state that our definition of forced marriage includes marriages that involve children. As part of this larger policy refinement work, we are taking international human rights standards into consideration (as the board suggests in Recommendation #2) and will commit to updating guidance to human reviewers should we make any updates to our external Community Standards (in response to Recommendation #3).
Considerations: We welcome the Board’s recommendation, which aligns with planned updates to our Human Exploitation policy. Currently, we remove content, activity or interactions that recruit people for, facilitate, or exploit people through a number of forms of human trafficking – including forced marriage.
We are in the process of clarifying our existing definition of forced marriages to include marriages involving children. As part of this process, we are working with experts to ensure that any updates to these policies are enforceable at scale. We will provide updates on this work in future reports to the Oversight Board.
Recommendation 2 (Implementing in Full) To ensure clarity for users, Meta should modify the Human Exploitation policy to define child marriage in line with international human rights standards to include marriage and informal unions of children under 18 years of age.
The Board will consider this recommendation implemented when Meta updates its public-facing Human Exploitation Community Standard to reflect the change.
Our commitment: We are working on clarifying our definitions and policy guidance in line with our response described in Recommendation #1.
Considerations: We will refine our definitions and guidance alongside our updates for Recommendation #1. This will include clarifications around marriage and informal unions involving children under 18 years of age.
Recommendation 3 (Implementing in Full) Meta should provide explicit guidance to human reviewers about child marriage being included in the definition of forced marriages.
The Board will consider this recommendation implemented when Meta provides updated internal documents demonstrating that the change was implemented.
Our commitment: We will clarify our guidance to human reviewers in line with updates to our definitions and policy guidance according to our response described in Recommendation #1 and #2. We will share our updated internal documents confidentially with the Board in the future.
Considerations:We are working on updates to our definitions and policy guidance in line with our response described in Recommendation #1.
Recommendation 4 (Assessing Feasibility) To protect children’s rights and to avoid Meta’s reliance on the spirit of the policy allowance, the company should expand the definition of facilitation in its internal guidelines to include the provision of any type of material aid (which include “services”) to enable exploitation.
The Board will consider this recommendation implemented when Meta provides updated internal documents demonstrating that the change was implemented.
Our commitment: We will consider refinements to our policy approach to “facilitation,” including options such as expanding the definition of facilitation to include the provision of any type of material aid (i.e. services).
Considerations: We will assess the possibility of expanding our definition of "facilitation" under our Human Exploitation policy. Our existing approach to facilitation includes removal of content that coordinates the transportation, transfer, or harboring of victims before or during the exploitation. Although providing material aid which enables exploitation is not explicitly called out as facilitation in our policies, it falls within the spirit of our policy and we understand that there may be opportunities to further clarify our guidance for reviewers. Before we introduce any updates to this definition, we also want to meet with internal experts and consider how these changes will apply at scale.
We will provide updates on the status of this work in future Biannual Updates on the Oversight Board.
