4/10/22, 10:47 Oversight Board | Independent Judgment. Transparency. Legitimacy. 7. Public comments The Oversight Board received two public comments related to this case. One of the comments was submitted from Asia Pacific and Oceania and one from Europe. The submissions covered the following themes: whether the content should stay on the platform, whether the comparison of Serbs to rats violates Meta’s Hate Speech policy, and suggestions on how to enforce content rules on Facebook more effectively. To read public comments submitted for this case, please click here. 8. Oversight Board analysis The Board looked at the question of whether this content should be restored through three lenses: Meta’s content policies, the company’s values, and its human rights responsibilities. 8.1 Compliance with Meta’s content policies The Board finds that the content in this case violates the Hate Speech Community Standard. It also violates the Violence and Incitement Standard. Hate Speech Meta’s Hate Speech policy prohibits attacks against people based on protected characteristics, including ethnicity. Here, the attacked group are ethnic Serbs living in Croatia, specifically in Knin, targeted on the basis of their ethnicity. While the caption and video do not mention ethnic Serbs by name, the content of the video in its historic context, the replacement of the name “Hamelin” with “Knin,” the lyrics used in the video, the identification of the piper with Čavoglave and therefore with the song by Thompson about Operation Storm, and the use of the tractor image are unmistakable references to Serb residents of Knin. Serbs are depicted as rats who must be removed from the city. The comments on the post and the many user reports confirm that this connection was abundantly clear to people who viewed the content. The content contains two “attacks” within the definition of that term in the Hate Speech policy. First, the Hate Speech policy prohibits comparisons to “[a]nimals that are culturally perceived as intellectually or physically inferior.” Meta’s Internal Implementation Standards, which are guidelines provided to content reviewers, specify that comparisons to “vermin” are prohibited under this policy. The video contains a visual comparison of Serbs to rats. This constitutes a dehumanizing comparison in violation of the Hate Speech policy and the Internal Implementation Standards. The Board finds that implied comparisons of the kind in this content are prohibited by Meta's hate speech policy. Meta explained that previous decisions not to remove the content were based on the assumption that the letter of the policy did not apply to implicit references to protected characteristics. The Board disagrees with this assumption. The letter of the policy prohibits attacks based on protected characteristics no matter whether references to those characteristics are explicit or implicit. The Hate Speech Standard states that comparisons can take a written or visual form, such as video, and the language of the Standard does not require that references to targeted groups be explicit. While this reading of the policy is in line with both its text and rationale, the policy does not clearly formulate that implicit references are covered by the policy too. Second, the content contains support for expelling Serbs from Knin. The rationale of the Hate Speech Standard defines attacks as “violent or dehumanising speech, harmful stereotypes, statements of inferiority, expressions of contempt, disgust or dismissal, cursing and calls for exclusion or segregation.” According to the policy line of the Hate Speech Community Standard applied in this case, explicit exclusion means supporting “things such as expelling certain groups or saying they are not allowed.” The video in this case celebrates a historical incident where ethnic Serbs were forcibly expelled from Knin and the content states the townspeople were much better off after the rats were gone. This video contains support for ethnic cleansing in violation of the Hate Speech Standard. Violence and Incitement The Violence and Incitement policy prohibits “content that threatens others by referring to known historical incidents of violence.” The caption and the video contain references to “Operation Storm,” the 1995 military operation that reportedly resulted in displacement, execution, and https://www.oversightboard.com/decision/FB-JRQ1XP2M 7/11