Criticism of EU Migration Policies and Immigrants Bundle

As part of its ongoing human rights due diligence, Meta should take all of the following steps in respect of the January 7, 2025, updates to the Hateful Conduct Community Standard. First, it should identify how the policy and enforcement updates may adversely impact the rights of immigrants, in particular refugees and asylum seekers, with a focus on markets where these populations are at heightened risk. Second, Meta should adopt measures to prevent and/or mitigate these risks and monitor their effectiveness. Third, Meta should update the Board on its progress and learnings every six months, and report on this publicly at the earliest opportunity.

The Board will consider this recommendation implemented when Meta provides the Board with robust data and analysis on the effectiveness of its prevention or mitigation measures on the cadence outlined above, and when Meta reports on this publicly.

Commitment Statement: We will assess the feasibility of this multi-part recommendation.

Considerations: Meta conducts ongoing, integrated, human rights due diligence to identify, prevent, mitigate and address potential adverse human rights impacts related to our policies, products and operations in line with the UNGPs, related guidance, and our human rights policy. Ahead of the January 7th changes, we assessed the risks of the changes and took into account relevant mitigations, such as the availability of other policies and user reports to address potentially harmful content.

We will assess the feasibility of implementing this recommendation and provide updates in future reports to the Oversight Board. We will also bundle future updates for this recommendation under recommendation #1 in the Gender Identity Debate Videos case.

When Meta audits its slur lists, it should ensure it carries out broad external engagement with relevant stakeholders. This should include consulting with impacted groups and civil society.

The Board will consider this recommendation implemented when Meta amends its explanation of how it audits and updates its market-specific slur lists on its Transparency Center

Commitment Statement: We regularly engage with stakeholders, including civil society, to maintain accurate lists of slurs across global regions. We are committed to formalizing this process to ensure that teams who manage our partnerships with external policy stakeholders and civil society groups will be involved at an early stage in our annual audit process to maximize opportunities for external input.

Considerations: Our current process for auditing slurs takes place on an annual basis, with additional audits taking place around elections and during crisis events. In this process, Global Operations teams, including regional experts, conduct a full review of our slurs lists for each region and provide samples of potential new slurs to add or remove from our lists based on new trends. Then, Content and Public Policy teams partner with Global Operations teams to carry out additional reviews and conduct outreach with external experts—including Trusted Partners. In considering the designation of new slurs, our teams consider both the harm associated with the use of these terms and the potential for over-enforcement and limitations on legitimate speech, particularly in the context of elections and discourse on issues of political significance.

As we standardize the process of engaging with external stakeholders, our Global Operations teams will partner with Trusted Partners to provide an early opportunity to review the lists if significant changes are proposed. This will take place before lists are finalized, so that external inputs may be holistically considered. We will update our Transparency Center page on “bringing local context to global standards” to include information on civil society’s new role in this process.

To reduce instances of content that violates its Hateful Conduct policy, Meta should update its internal guidance to make it clear that Tier 1 attacks (including those based on immigration status) are prohibited, unless it is clear from the content that it refers to a defined subset of less than half of the group. This would reverse the current presumption that content refers to a minority unless it specifically states otherwise.

The Board will consider this recommendation implemented when Meta provides the Board with the updated internal rules.

Commitment Statement: We do not anticipate that we will reverse our current approach to the Hateful Conduct Community Standard to allow content that does not clearly refer to more than half a group, as a reversal is likely to restrict legitimate speech on our platforms.

Proposed Considerations: Our Hateful Conduct policy aims to remove content that directly attacks people on the basis of their protected characteristics. We remove what we define as Tier 1 attacks against people, but allow content when it is unclear if the attack is referring to more than half, or the majority, a particular group of people. This means that when content refers to “some” or “lots of” a particular group of people, we allow that content, even if it is coupled with a Tier 1 Hate Speech attack, because it is not clearly targeting an entire group and may be related to more nuanced debate or legitimate speech that would otherwise be restricted by enforcement at scale. While at times this allowed speech may still be considered offensive to some, reversing the existing approach could place an undue expectation on users to explain their positions. Given these considerations, at this time, we do not expect to reverse the current approach to this speech on our platforms and will provide no further updates on this recommendation in our next report to the Board.