Overruling a Facebook ban, Meta’s Oversight Board okayed a presidential ticket getting the “Dumb and Dumber” treatment.
A small victory for both free speech and common sense was won for social media this week when the purported independent Oversight Board of Facebook’s parent company Meta determined a meme had not violated their policy against bullying and harassment.
Now, with less than two weeks remaining until Election Day, anyone was free to share the image that superimposed Vice President Kamala Harris’ and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s faces onto actors Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels on a promotional image for their 1994 film “Dumb and Dumber.”
Initially, the image was said to have been pulled down from Facebook alleging that it had violated their policy regarding any “derogatory sexualized photoshop or drawings,” seemingly because the actors portraying Lloyd and Harry were pinching each other’s nipples through their shirts as seen in a Netflix promotion.
“You sold my dead bird to a blind kid?” #DumbAndDumber pic.twitter.com/2gN4Mye5ln
— Netflix (@netflix) December 26, 2014
In the ruling Wednesday, the Oversight Board found, “This post is nothing more than a commonplace satirical image of prominent politicians and is instantly recognizable as such.”
They went on to state, “In the context of elections, the Board has previously recommended that Meat should develop a framework for evaluating its election integrity efforts in order to provide the company with relevant data to improve its content moderation system as a whole and decide how best to employ its resources in electoral contexts.”
Further, Facebook’s “failure to recognize the nature of this post and treat it accordingly raises serious concerns about the systems and resources Meta has in place to effectively make content determinations in such electoral contexts.”
The board suggested “over-enforcement” of the policy ahead of the election “may lead to the excessive removal of political speech and undermine the ability to criticize government officials and political candidates, including in a sarcastic manner.”
Social media companies’ impact on what information was or wasn’t made available to the public was considered a factor in the 2020 presidential election as many suggested after the race they may have changed their vote had they known about the Hunter Biden laptop story that was suppressed in the final days.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had gone as far as to admit earlier this year that the federal government had pressured Facebook to censor free speech on the platform.
In his own statement on the ruling, Oversight Board co-chair Michael McConnell said, “Protecting social media users’ right to free speech is a core principle for the Oversight Board. The overwhelming majority of our decisions are to ‘leave up’ or restore content that was removed by Meta.”
“Platforms should be a place where political debate and discussion can flourish, particularly during elections, protests, and other social movements. The Board will continue holding Meta accountable to ensure its policies and enforcement are applied fairly,” he went on, mere weeks after it had been determined that the anti-Israel slogan “from the river to the sea” was not a violation of their hate speech policies.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Meta contended, “We mistakenly removed this post but restored it after the issue was brought to our attention.”
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Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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