Description du cas
Account Ban for Targeting Public Figures
Today, the Board is announcing new cases for consideration. As part of this, we invite people and organizations to submit public comments by using the button below.
Case Selection
As we cannot hear every appeal, the Board prioritizes cases that have the potential to affect lots of users around the world, are of critical importance to public discourse or raise important questions about Meta’s policies.
The cases that we are announcing today are:
Account Ban for Targeting Public Figures
2026-006-IG-MR, 2026-007-IG-MR, 2026-08-IG-MR, 2026-009-IG-MR, 2026-0010-IG-MR
Meta Referrals
Submit a public comment using the button below
The Board will assess whether Meta was right to permanently disable a user account, following a referral in which the company requested guidance from the Board. This is the first time the Board has taken a case on Meta's approach to permanently disabling accounts – an urgent concern for Meta’s users. It represents a significant opportunity to provide users with greater transparency on Meta’s account enforcement policies and practices, make recommendations for improvement, and expand the types of cases the Board can review.
In 2025, Meta permanently disabled a widely followed Instagram account for repeatedly violating the company’s Community Standards. Meta referred its decision to the Board, pointing to the challenges of respecting political speech while following its account disablement rules when users engage in patterns of abuse, including against public figures and for threats against female journalists.
Meta referred five posts made in the year before they permanently disabled the Instagram account. Multiple posts included visual threats of violence and harassment against a female journalist. Other posts featured anti-gay slurs against prominent politicians and content depicting a sex act, alleging misconduct against minorities. Meta determined that the posts violated the Violence and Incitement, Bullying and Harassment, Hateful Conduct, and Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity Community Standards. The company removed each post from the platform and applied a strike to the account after each violation.
The account came to the attention of Meta staff, who reported it to the company's internal experts for review. They determined that the account demonstrated a persistent pattern of repeated violations of the company’s policies over the previous year and posed a safety risk, as some of the referred posts called for violence that could lead to death. While the account had not yet accrued enough strikes to be automatically disabled, this risk, combined with the account’s multiple violations of Meta’s policies, led to the decision to permanently disable the account.
Meta’s Account Integrity policy notes that the company may disable accounts that persistently violate its policies, and in its referral, the company explained that it also disables accounts that demonstrate a clear intent to violate its policies. Meta noted that decisions to disable accounts can also be made outside of the strike system on a case-by-case basis, considering a user’s behavior and activity.
The Board would appreciate public comments that address:
- How best to ensure due process and fairness to people whose accounts are penalized or permanently disabled.
- The effectiveness of measures used by social media platforms to protect public figures and journalists from accounts engaged in repeated abuse and threats of violence, in particular against women in the public eye.
- Challenges in identifying and considering off-platform context when assessing threats against public figures and journalists.
- Research into the efficacy of punitive measures to shape online behaviors, and the efficacy of alternative or complementary interventions.
- Good industry practices in transparency reporting on account enforcement decisions and related appeals.
In its decisions, the Board can issue policy recommendations to Meta. While recommendations are not binding, Meta must respond to them within 60 days. As such, the Board welcomes public comments proposing recommendations that are relevant to these cases.
Public Comments
If you or your organization feel you can contribute valuable perspectives that can help with reaching a decision on the cases announced today, you can submit your contributions using the button below. Please note that public comments can be provided anonymously. The public comment window is open for 14 days, closing at 23.59 Pacific Standard Time (PST) on Tuesday, 3 February.
What’s Next
Over the next few weeks, Board Members will be deliberating these cases. Once they have reached their decision, we will post it on the Decisions page.
Commentaires
The case description given isn't ambiguous. Any judgement calls that might be ambiguous aren't described. The user did more than enough to get a permanent ban. As such, this case is a poor illustration of the concerns that need to be addressed.
I've learned to be skittish on social media, so much of what I know about Meta's policies is secondhand. My knowledge of Instagram is mostly limited to news articles about negative impacts on teen mental health. Facebook moderation has a strong reputation for afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable. Disadvantaged minorities face censure for being visible and talking about their lives where people who hate them can see them. People who spread hate and terror get let off the hook. This happens on both small scales and large scales, leading to famous cases of mass violence.
A common ideology for large internet platforms is to apply the US tradition of expansive First Amendment protections to systems that work very differently from the one the law applies to. Social media platforms are not neutral hosts to many separate spaces, communities, and institutions. They do not enforce policies with the level of violence and exclusion available to a state. They actively facilitate and catalyze interaction. Many different design decisions influence what kinds of expression show up on a platform. Many of those decisions are made with the goal of increasing users and profit, even if that makes the user experience palpably worse. In particular, Facebook's algorithms favor reactive emotions in ways that ratchet up conflict across the platform. Reddit's voting system enforces conformity. Twitter favored knee-jerk reactions and maelstroms of conversation on trending topics. These environments are not consistent with common hand-wringing concerns over the rights of public figures or notable users to have a platform for the full range of ideas and sentiments.
To address due process, an important factor is to have a clear process. How are decisions structured and ordered? What information is available at each stage? Who has discretion, and how far does that discretion extend? How much effort is required? If someone makes a complaint against someone else, both sides likely have a stake in the outcome. Some issues should not end with a single moderator's discretion. That means there's some kind of escalating appeals process. At some stage, there needs to be a way to systematically review and contest a class of decisions, rather than individual ones. This is an area where Meta *should* think like a state due to its scale and complexity.
newDemocracy's work solely focuses on how to reach trusted public decisions, and our emphasis is on applying the lessons from the (widely trusted) criminal jury method.
In brief, we see value in bringing together small groups of lottery-selected everyday people (everyone has an even chance, and you get past the noisy actvist voices who tend to dominate), giving them enough time to understand the nuance and complexity of a topic, give them a specific task and asking them to find common ground (80-90% agreement). Hearing that a supermajority of everyday people agree a given decision is fair is core to greater trust.
Noting the request to"... speak to Meta’s approach to account strikes and removals and how best to ensure fairness and transparency for users." we think the jury approach solves two problems.
1. Meta is a pretty easy "bogeyman" to attack. We would suggest a method that has your users making decisions is politically preferable to one where the company's representatives make the decisions.
2. Your sheer scale (and global breadth) requires a scalable solution, and centralising this within an Oversight Board can never achieve this.
As a strawman for discussion, consider if 12-15 people from the country of a user facing a ban were assembled to understand your policies (and legal constraints), reviewed the content and found a >80% level of agreement on a decision. We suggest to you that you will reach more trusted decisions.
We are available to further discuss this should the concept prove to be of interest.