4/10/22, 10:47 Oversight Board | Independent Judgment. Transparency. Legitimacy. processes for escalating content are not sufficiently clear and effective. As such, the Board urges Meta to provide more information on how it escalates content. The Oversight Board’s decision The Oversight Board overturns Meta’s original decision to leave up the content. As a policy advisory opinion, the Oversight Board recommends that Meta: Clarify the Hate Speech Community Standard and the guidance provided to reviewers, explaining that even implicit references to protected groups are prohibited by the policy, when the reference would be reasonably understood. In line with Meta’s commitment following the "Wampum Belt" case (2021-012-FB-UA), the Board recommends that Meta notify all users who have reported content when, on subsequent review, it changes its initial determination. Meta should also disclose the results of any experiments assessing the feasibility of introducing this change with the public. *Case summaries provide an overview of the case and do not have precedential value. Full case decision 1. Decision summary The Oversight Board overturns Meta’s original decision to keep the content on Facebook. Following over 390 user reports to remove this content and Meta’s additional review of the content when the Board selected the case, Meta found this content to be non-violating. However, when developing the explanation of its decision to the Board, Meta reversed its position and declared that this was an “enforcement error,” removing the content for violating the Hate Speech policy. The Board finds that the content violates Meta’s Hate Speech and Violence and Incitement Community Standards. It finds that the Hate Speech policy on comparing people to animals applies to content that targets groups through implicit references to protected characteristics. In this case, the content compared Serbs to rats. The Board also finds that removing the content is consistent with Meta’s values and human rights responsibilities. 2. Case description and background In early December 2021, a public Facebook page describing itself as a news portal for Croatia posted a video with a caption in Croatian. Meta translated the caption as “The Player from Čavoglave and the rats from Knin.” The video was an edited version of Disney’s cartoon “The Pied Piper.” It was two minutes and 10 seconds long, with a voiceover in Croatian which was overlaid with the word “pretjerivač,” referring to a Croatian online platform of the same name. The video portrayed a city overrun by rats. While the entrance to the city in the original Disney cartoon was labelled “Hamelin,” the city in the edited video was labelled as the Croatian city of “Knin.” At the start of the video, a narrator described how rats and humans lived in the royal city of Knin for many years. The narrator continues that the rats decided that they wanted to live in a “pure rat country,” so they started harassing and persecuting people living in the city. The narrator explains that when rats took over the city, a piper from the Croatian village of Čavoglave appeared. Initially, the rats did not take the piper seriously and continued with “the great rat aggression.” However, after the piper started to play a melody with his “magic flute,” the rats, captivated by the melody, started to sing “their favourite song” and followed the piper out of the city. Meta translated the lyrics of the song sung by the rats as: “What is that thing shining on Dinara, Dujić's cockade on his head [...] Freedom will rise from Dinara, it will be brought by Momčilo the warlord.” The video then portrayed the city's people closing the gate behind the piper and the rats. The video ended with the piper herding the rats into a tractor, which then disappeared. The narrator concluded that once the piper lured all the rats into the “magical tractor,” the rats “disappeared forever from these lands” and “everyone lived happily ever after.” The following factual historical background is relevant to the Board’s decision. Croatia declared its independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on June 25, 1991. The remaining state of Yugoslavia (later called Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), which became predominantly of Serb ethnicity but contained many ethnic minorities, including Croats, used its armed forces in an attempt to prevent secession. The ensuing war, which lasted until 1995, resulted in extreme brutality on both sides, including forcible displacement of more than 200,000 ethnic Serbs from Croatia ( Human Rights Watch Report, Croatia, August 1996). The Serb ethnic minority in Croatia, with the support of the Yugoslav National Army, opposed Croatian independence and (among other actions) established a state-like entity known as the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK). Knin became the capital of the RSK. During this period, many Croats were driven out of Knin. In 1995, https://www.oversightboard.com/decision/FB-JRQ1XP2M 3/11