Statement: Oversight Board Complicit in Meta’s Abandonment of Fact Checking, Should Resign En Masse

9 January 2025: The Real Facebook Oversight Board issued the following statement:

Meta’s Oversight Board should resign en masse. Whether for their own values or for the realization that they have been sidelined, ignored and marginalized, the experiment has failed. While the Oversight Board touts their success rates, the reality is they rely on partial, rather than full uptake of their recommendations. And the Oversight Board has been sidelined from the most consequential decisions Meta has made — from engaging in Ukraine to the decision this week to end fact checking.

While it is not known how much each Board member is paid, all of them have been paid from a trust set by Meta. The shameful statement from four Oversight Board members that Meta’s new approach will “enhance trust” for users was followed almost immediately by new rules from Meta that it was acceptable to label LGBT people as being mentally ill, just as one example.

There is no Oversight Board member who should not be anything other than ashamed by their complicity in these shifts to Meta’s content moderation. And there is no rational argument for seeing Meta’s announcement other than a death knell and declaration of failure of the Oversight Board. No compensation is enough to justify this kind of reputation laundering.

Meta and the Oversight Board will say they have no purview or responsibility for these changes to Meta’s approach to fact checking. That’s by design, as the Oversight Board has limited purview over anything other than limited cases referred to them by Meta. If the Oversight Board has no role in the single biggest change in content moderation since their founding, clearly the experiment has failed.