Meta Platforms’ Oversight Board on Wednesday told the company to keep up a Facebook post superimposing the faces of U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz onto a parody “Dumb and Dumber” movie poster showing the characters pinching each other’s nipples through their clothing.
The board accused the company of acting too aggressively against an obvious political parody with the post. The original movie poster depicts two male characters known for engaging in gross-out bawdy antics.
Meta originally took the post down for violating a rule against “derogatory sexualized photoshop” manipulations of images, but restored it once the board informed Meta it was examining the case, the Oversight Board said in a blog post.
The company told the board it “does not consider that pinching a person’s nipple through their clothing qualifies as sexual activity,” the board said.
The board, which is funded by Meta but operates independently, did not comment directly on Meta’s rationale but said the post in question showed a “non-sexualized derogatory depiction” of political figures and therefore was not in violation of Facebook rules.
Meta’s initial removal was a worrying sign of the company’s tendency toward “overenforcement” of its policies against satire and political speech, it added.
“This post is nothing more than a commonplace satirical image of prominent politicians and is instantly recognizable as such,” the board wrote.
It said that the company’s failure to handle the post appropriately on its first try “raises serious concerns about the systems and resources Meta has in place to effectively make content determinations in such electoral contexts.”
The case highlights the fine line the world’s biggest social media platform must walk in moderating posts pertaining to the highly charged U.S. political environment. Conservatives frequently complain it removes too much of their content while progressives generally say it does too little to police misinformation and abuse on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads.
Meta relies heavily on automated AI-powered enforcement of its rules. This controls the cost of moderating the posts of its more than 3 billion users, but elicits gripes from users who say the systems often fail to detect parody and context.
—Katie Paul, Reuters
Login to add comment
Other posts in this group
Chinese hackers remotely access
Cybercriminals who hacked Rhode Island’s system for health and benefits programs have released files to a site on
Whether to raise money, placate shareholders, or generate positive press, AI’s biggest companies have a habit of announcing advancements that are nowhere near ready to ship.
The in
The German government accused U.S. billionaire
The next housing boom will happen above Earth. Replacements for an aging International Space Station (ISS) slated for a 2030 decommission, NASA’s Artemis mission returning humans to the moon and p
So you woke up on Christmas morning to a new Mac. Perhaps it’s the miraculous M4
