The ban on Meta accounts is not transparent: Facebook and Instagram penalties vary widely

The Monitoring Board of Meta ‘ s independent regulatory body indicated on Thursday that Meta ‘ s account closures lacked due process, lacked clarity in the determination of violations and lacked user support for complaints.

Earlier this year, the Supervisory Commission launched an investigation into the Meta account irregularities policy to examine a case involving threats of violence against journalists. The Supervisory Board agreed that, given the seriousness of the threat, Meta was right to permanently block the account.

This case raised public concern about the “serious doubts” about the company’s handling of such actions, as well as about the “legitimacy” of its account closure procedures. Owing to the nature of the test case in this case, the Commission did not make a formal recommendation to Meta, but did indicate some potential direction for improvement. The Committee ‘ s analysis highlighted the confusion of the rules and penalties for the closure of accounts on the Meta platform and the resulting great distress for users.

The Committee notes that Meta treated Facebook and Instagram differently. While both platforms impose “warning” penalties on accounts, the consequences of repeated warnings vary. On Facebook, several irregularities in accounts were temporarily blocked and eventually completely sealed. The Committee notes, however, that there are no similar penalties on Instagram. Meta limits the use of Instagram’s live feed or removes its account from the recommendation (which is commonly referred to by Instagram users as a “shadow ban”).

The Supervisory Board stated that one of the main “intermediate” penalties of Instagram was to restrict live broadcasting, which was surprising, since the live broadcasting function was not applicable to all accounts (at least 1,000 fans were needed). “In the case of a violation in a permanent post, it is more likely that a direct response to the penalty for the violation by suspending the user’s posting capacity (e.g. by limiting its accounts to a read-only mode) will act as a constraint on the user’s behaviour.”

The Committee also addressed the long-standing grievances of Facebook and Instagram users over the closure of accounts. The Commission stated that, in addition to the “innumerable” complaints received regularly by individual members from blocked users, they had received more than 750 public comments on the case.

“The user feedback system failed, and they were unable to file a complaint against Meta’s blocked account, and were never blocked at that time, nor were they able to download the content. Many users also point out that these decisions appear to have been made automatically by the system and that there is no manual review of even complaints against long-run accounts with large numbers of fans.”

In its guidance to Meta, the Committee recommended that Meta should provide users with a better complaints process, allow users to submit written explanations and inform users about the sanction reviews handled by AI. The Committee suggested that Meta should increase its transparency by adding information on account closures to transparency reports. It is also recommended that Meta provide a dedicated channel through which “high-risk violence targets and their representatives” can report serious threats against them.

Given that the case was described as a “pilot”, it was not clear whether Meta planned to make any substantive policy changes in line with the Committee’s criticism. But there is still some hope for those who want Meta to improve. The Committee indicated that it planned to take up more cases in the future involving a ban on accounts, which was expected to give it a better chance to move some reforms forward.