Oversight Board Selects a Case Regarding a Post Calling for Violence in Ethiopia

To improve enforcement of its content policies during periods of armed conflict, Meta should assess the feasibility of establishing a sustained internal mechanism that provides the expertise, capacity and coordination required to review and respond to content effectively for the duration of a conflict. The Board will consider this recommendation implemented when Meta provides an overview of the feasibility of a sustained internal mechanism to the Board.

Our commitment: We plan to implement process improvements that will improve our identification of risks on our platforms and coordination of mitigation efforts during sustained conflicts. This includes assessing the feasibility of a new crisis coordination team to provide dedicated Operations oversight of all tactical execution of support efforts before, during, and after crises.

Considerations: We continue to improve and standardize our response mechanisms and guiding protocols for high-risk events, including periods of armed conflict. We currently deploy Integrity Product Operations Centers (IPOCs) to anticipate and respond to high-risk and crisis events. IPOCs bring together subject matter experts from across the company – including threat intelligence, data science, software engineering, research, global operations, policy, civil rights and other legal teams – for real-time monitoring of events so we can quickly identify and address any emerging trends or potential abuse. IPOCs are generally established for a defined time period but can be extended or abbreviated based on situational needs. Their duration varies based on our assessment of multiple factors, including risk level and ability to address issues with existing regional functions.

IPOCs are not intended to be a long-term solution for extended periods of armed conflict, but concluding an IPOC does not mean that we believe the issues associated with the crisis are solved or that special interventions are no longer necessary. Ongoing conflict situations often require continuous monitoring and different types of interventions and/or crisis response over time. Shifting from the IPOC to a more steady-state response indicates that we have identified and erected the support infrastructure needed to address the key issues for a region. For example, an IPOC command center allows us to gather the training data necessary for classifiers to understand the regional and situational nuances to carry on effective at-scale content moderation in and after the crisis context.

Our work developing and implementing the Crisis Policy Protocol has codified our policy-specific responses to crises to ensure they are applied systematically and complements our existing company-wide crisis response efforts. To address longer-term conflict situations, some regional teams are implementing more sustained conflict response mechanisms through expanded product and enforcement interventions. These efforts include interventions targeting how reshared content is distributed as well as continued optimization of automated tools in smaller regions with more limited language support. In areas with limited language support, we also continue to improve our detection and enforcement of abusive behaviors, such as addressing inauthentic accounts, repeat offenders and obfuscation tactics by bad actors.

We are working on implementing global standards for crisis response to ensure consistency and sustained support for high-risk regions. Ongoing improvement efforts include tools that standardize data collection and analysis and better predict the spread of harmful content. In line with the board’s recommendation, we are also assessing the feasibility of establishing a new dedicated crisis coordination team to complement our Risk Management and Strategic Response Policy teams with dedicated Operations oversight of tactical support execution before, during, and after crises. We will provide further updates on our progress in a future Quarterly Update.