13/3/24, 13:44 Oversight Board | Independent Judgment. Transparency. Legitimacy. soldiers were being detained by the opposing Azerbaijani armed forces, meeting the definition of “prisoner of war” contained in Meta’s internal guidance to reviewers. This information was sufficient to find that the content was contrary to the rule prohibiting content revealing the identity of prisoners of war through the sharing of imagery. Newsworthiness allowance The Board finds that the public interest in the video outweighed the potential risks of harm, and that it was appropriate for escalation teams with access to expertise and additional contextual information, including cross-platform trends, to apply the newsworthiness allowance to keep the content on the platform. While it is not presumed that anyone’s speech is inherently newsworthy, the assessment of the newsworthiness allowance accounts for various factors, including the country-specific circumstances and the nature of the speech and the speaker. In such cases, Meta should conduct a thorough review that weighs the public interest, including the public’s right to know about serious wrongdoing and the potential to prevent, mitigate and remedy severe human rights harms through public disclosure of wrongdoing, against the risks of harm to privacy, dignity, security and voice, pursuant to the international human rights standards, as reflected in Meta’s Corporate Human Rights Policy. The application of the newsworthiness allowance in a situation as complex and fast-moving as an armed conflict requires a case-by-case contextual assessment to mitigate risks and secure the public’s access to important information. The factors Meta identified in its assessment, detailed in Section 6, were all pertinent to assessing the potential for serious harm resulting from the display of the video against adverse impacts that could result from suppressing this kind of content. The absence of evidence of videos like this being used in this particular conflict to further mistreatment of detainees, taken together with clear trends of similar content being primarily available through social media and highly relevant to campaigns and legal proceedings for accountability of serious crimes, militated in favour of keeping the content on the platform. The Board emphasizes that it is important that Meta has systems in place to gain the kind of highly context specific insights required to enable a rapid case-by-case assessment of potential harms, taking into account Meta’s human rights responsibilities. Violent and Graphic Content https://www.oversightboard.com/decision/FB-YLRV35WD/ 16/26