Medicine-Related News in Malaysia

Summary decisions examine cases in which Meta has reversed its original decision on a piece of content after the Board brought it to the company’s attention and include information about Meta’s acknowledged errors. They are approved by a Board Member panel, rather than the full Board, do not involve public comments and do not have precedential value for the Board. Summary decisions directly bring about changes to Meta’s decisions, providing transparency on these corrections, while identifying where Meta could improve its enforcement.

Summary

An administrator of the Facebook page of a Chinese-language newspaper in Malaysia appealed Meta’s decision to take down six posts. Each post contains an image of specific medical drugs or an assortment of pills, accompanied by text on medicine-related news involving trade, pricing and insurance policies. After the Board brought the appeals to Meta’s attention, the company reversed its original decisions and restored all six posts.

About the Cases

Between November 2024 and May 2025, a Chinese-language newspaper based in Malaysia posted on its Facebook page six pieces of content that report on medicine-related developments involving trade, pricing and insurance policies:

• Three posts contain an image of an assortment of unidentified pills, accompanied by news headlines reporting on aspects of drug pricing in Malaysia, such as spot checks on clinics, drug prices in private clinics and pharmacies, as well as drug pricing transparency implemented by the government in response to surges in medical insurance costs.
• One post contains an image of an assortment of unidentified pills along with a US dollar bill, accompanied by a news headline on China’s offer of exemptions from customs duties on certain products including medication.
• One post contains an image of the prescription drug Saxenda alongside a photo of then-US President Joe Biden, accompanied by a news headline on a proposal by the Biden administration to include the drug in medical insurance.
• One post contains an image of the prescription drug Wegovy, accompanied by a news headline on US President Donald Trump’s re-introduction of a policy which lowered US drug prices.

Meta removed all six posts under the Restricted Goods and Services policy and the newspaper’s Facebook page was “ unpublished” (meaning the page was removed, a measure similar to account deactivation).

In appeals to the Board, the page administrator explained that they are a “legally registered, government-regulated media organization in Malaysia” and that they “adhere to strict editorial standards” with a “duty to keep the public informed.” They argued that their intention when posting content to Facebook was to report on matters of public interest, such as access to healthcare, local medicine prices and global pharmaceutical policies. They also emphasized that the removal of journalistic content “not only undermines media freedom in Malaysia, but also raises serious concerns about Facebook’s role in controlling access to international policy news.”

As relevant context for this decision, the Board notes Freedom House’s 2025 report on Malaysia which deemed the country “partially free,” highlighting, among other issues, that in 2024, “the government and courts took a number of steps that affected media and internet freedom during the year.” Reporters Without Borders, in its World Press Freedom Index 2025, similarly noted that “recent threats to journalism [in Malaysia] have included prosecutions involving huge expenses, police searches of media outlet headquarters, disregard for the confidentiality of sources, and expulsions of foreign reporters or whistleblowers.”

Meta’s Restricted Goods and Services policy prohibits “attempts to buy, sell or trade prescription drugs,” as well as “asks for prescription drugs, except when content discusses the affordability, accessibility or efficacy of prescription drugs in a medical context.” Prescription drugs are defined in the policy as “drugs that require a prescription or medical professionals to administer.”

After the Board selected the cases, Meta reviewed its initial decision to unpublish the page and determined that it incorrectly removed all six posts. Meta explained that under the Restricted Goods and Services policy, the company allows “news content that informs or raises awareness about prescription drugs and their effects as long as it does not promote buying, selling, trading or requesting drugs.” Meta considered that the Facebook page, in all six posts, did not attempt to buy, sell, trade or request prescription drugs. Consequently, Meta restored all posts, republished the page and reversed the strikes against the administrator’s account and the page.

Board Authority and Scope

The Board has authority to review Meta’s decision following an appeal from the user whose content was removed (Charter Article 2, Section 1; Bylaws Article 3, Section 1).

When Meta acknowledges it made an error and reverses its decision in a case under consideration for Board review, the Board may select that case for a summary decision (Bylaws Article 2, Section 2.1.3). The Board reviews the original decision to increase understanding of the content moderation process, reduce errors, and increase fairness for Facebook, Instagram and Threads users.

Significance of Cases

This bundle provides several examples of the over-enforcement of Meta’s Restricted Goods and Services Community Standard and how it may impact news reporting on issues of public interest, such as medicine-related policies and developments. Not only were six pieces of content removed, but the page was unpublished by Meta, preventing it from further engaging in news reporting on Facebook. When discussing four enforcement errors that impacted a single Facebook page in the Reporting on Somaliland Current Affairs decision, the Board stated that, while it “understands that errors happen in content moderation at scale because of volume, complexity, and the limits of automation and human judgment,” it is “deeply concerned that Meta’s appeals systems failed to provide adequate remedy for the user in these cases.” The decision concluded that Meta’s engagement with the Board during its investigation highlights a “systemic weakness in error assessment and identification,” further emphasizing the importance of providing users with effective remedy.

In the decision, the Board recommended that “to protect journalism in regions where media freedom is repressed, Meta should develop new criteria and systems to proactively enrol pages or accounts engaged in journalism in these regions to Sensitive Entity Secondary Review (SSR). Follower thresholds should be adjusted relative to market size, and existing criteria for news organization designation should not be a bar to entry. Trusted authorities like the Committee to Protect Journalists’ impunity index should be used to prioritize high-risk regions.” ( Reporting on Somaliland Current Affairs, recommendation no. 4). The Sensitive Entity Secondary Review is part of Meta’s cross-check system, which was designed to provide additional layers of review for potentially violating content. Meta is yet to provide its initial response to this recommendation.

Additionally, the Board believes that Meta should strive to improve its enforcement of accuracy rates in relation to the Community Standard on Restricted Goods and Services across languages and regions. In this regard, the Board has previously recommended that “Meta should conduct regular assessments on reviewer accuracy rates focused on the Restricted Goods and Services policy.” In implementing this recommendation, the Board expected Meta to share the results of these assessments with the Board, including how these results will inform improvements to enforcement operations and policy development, and summarize the results in its quarterly Board transparency reports ( Asking for Adderall®, recommendation no. 3). The Board considers this recommendation to be reframed by Meta, since the company’s response did not address the recommendation’s core objective. In November 2023, Meta stated that it “already collects and assesses data on the basis of takedowns and restoration,” including takedowns under the Restricted Goods and Services policy, and “reports the amount of appealed content and content that is restored on Facebook and Instagram in [its] Community Standards Enforcement Report” (Meta’s Q3 2023 Quarterly Update on the Oversight Board). The Board notes, however, that the takedown and restoration metrics Meta referenced are not the same as the reviewer accuracy metrics mentioned in the recommendation, which are intended to measure how often content moderators are making errors in an independent review, not linked to appeals. The Board also notes that Meta didn’t share how the data the company collects informs improvements to enforcement operations and policy development.

In the same decision, the Board also recommended that Meta “study the consequences and trade-offs of implementing a dynamic prioritization system that orders appeals for human review and consider whether the fact that an enforcement decision resulted in an account restriction should be a criterion within this system” ( Asking for Adderall®, recommendation no. 2). Meta has reported progress towards implementation of this recommendation. In its H1 2025 Report on the Oversight Board, Meta stated that its “current human review ranking systems including [its] mistake prevention systems and appeals management ultimately enable multiple reviews of enforcement decisions. [Meta’s] ranking models are optimized to ensure that the highest priority content receives timely human review. [Meta] continues to maintain transparency when [it] prioritizes content for review with emphasis on severity, virality and likelihood of the content to violate [its] policies. [Meta] consolidates such signals to create ranking scores which determine human review prioritization. Per [Meta’s] previous update, [the company] continues to assess the various factors that inform prioritization for human review and will provide progress on this work in future updates.”

The Board believes that fully implementing the recommendations mentioned above would allow Meta to readily identify shortcomings, allocating resources to improve accuracy rates where needed. Moreover, full implementation would provide users engaging in news reporting with a more effective remedy, especially to reverse erroneous account restrictions. Finally, public reporting on the accuracy of reviews under the Restricted Goods and Services policy would increase transparency and generate engagement with Meta that has the potential to lead to further improvements.

Decision

The Board overturns Meta’s original decisions to remove the six pieces of content. The Board acknowledges Meta’s correction of its initial errors once the Board brought the cases to Meta’s attention.

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