12/20/23, 4:12 PM Oversight Board | Independent judgement. Transparency. Legitimacy. Meta removed an Instagram post containing a captioned video depicting the aftermath of an attack at a church in Nigeria, for violating its policies on violent and graphic content, bullying and harassment, and dangerous individuals and organisations. A majority of the Board finds that the content should be restored to the platform with a "disturbing content" warning screen, requiring users to click through to see the video. A minority of the Board disagrees and would uphold Meta's decision to remove the content. 2. Case description and background On 5 June 2022, terrorists attacked a Catholic church in Owo, southwestern Nigeria, killing at least 40 people and injuring approximately 90 others. Within hours of the attack, an Instagram user in Nigeria posted a video on their public account that appears to be of the aftermath, showing motionless and bloodied bodies on the church floor, some with their faces visible. Chaotic sounds, including people wailing and screaming, can be heard in the background. The video was initially posted without a caption. There were fewer than 50 comments. Those seen by the Board included prayers for victims, crying emojis and statements about safety in Nigeria. The author of the post had responded to several showing solidarity with those sentiments. After the user posted the content, it was identified by one of Meta's Violent and Graphic Content Media Matching Service banks, which contained a substantially similar video. This bank automatically flags content which has previously been identified by human reviewers as violating the company's rules. In this case, the bank referred the user's video to an automated content moderation tool called a classifier, which can assess how likely content is to violate a Meta policy. The classifier determined that the video should be allowed on Instagram. It also determined that the content likely contained imagery of violent deaths and, as a result, automatically applied a "disturbing content" warning screen as required by the Violent and Graphic Content policy. Meta did not notify the user that the warning screen had been applied. Over the following 48 hours, three users reported the content, including for depicting death and severe injury. At the same time, Meta's staff were working to identify and deal with content arising from the attack. Meta's policy team was alerted about the attack by regional staff and added videos of the incident to a different Media Matching Service bank, an "escalations bank". Content in this escalations bank has been found to be violating by Meta's specialist internal teams, and any https://www.oversightboard.com/decision/IG-OZNR5J1Z/ 5/26