We welcome the Oversight Board’s decision today, August 1, 2024, on this case bundle which deals with two pieces of content posted to Facebook. The first piece of content concerned a post which shared a news article about a claim that an Indigenous Australian land council made to parkland in a Sydney suburb. The accompanying caption included a statement supporting the exclusion of Indigenous Australians from this land using cursing.
The second piece of content concerned a post which shared a news article that describes an incident in which a woman’s car was chased and repeatedly rammed by teenagers during a week-long crime-wave. The accompanying caption assumed that the teenagers were Indigenous Australians, despite no indication of such in the article shared, and called them “ratbags,” a term for a stupid person in Australian English.
Upon initial review, Meta left this content up. However, after the Board brought the cases to our attention, we determined that both pieces of content violate our Hate Speech policy, as laid out in the Facebook Community Standards, and removed both pieces of content. Meta removes content that includes “targeted cursing” directed at “a person or group of people on the basis of their protected characteristic(s).” Meta also removes content that, on the basis of a protected characteristic, suggests mental inferiority.