Meta’s Oversight Board is planning job cuts, The Washington Post reported Monday, citing anonymous sources.
The Oversight Board is a Meta-funded, independent group of experts who help decide whether controversial content should be banned from Facebook and Instagram. Basically, users report posts for being violent, sexually explicit, hateful, or other controversial attributes, and the board is responsible for determining whether those posts stay or go. But the board has been scrutinized for being too slow — taking months to decide whether they’ll take a case and more months to make a decision. In one quarter in 2022, the group took on only three of 347,000 cases submitted by users, The Verge reported. Some critics also say the board has too-limited authority to make substantial decisions for Meta.
Neither Meta nor its Oversight Board immediately responded to Quartz’s request for comment, but the chairperson of the Oversight Board Trust, Stephen Neal, said in a statement obtained by The Post that there will be “targeted cuts” in order “to further optimize our operations by prioritizing the most impactful aspects of our work.” A Meta spokesperson told the outlet that Meta “remains committed to the Oversight Board.”
News of the planned cuts come just as Meta is reportedly facing a new probe from the European Union, which alleges the company isn’t doing enough to combat disinformation. The EU is concerned that the company’s mechanism to report misinformation and disinformation isn’t user friendly, The Financial Times reported Monday. Meta also didn’t respond to Quartz’s request to comment on the EU investigation, but a spokesperson told FT that the company “look[s] forward to continuing [its] co-operation with the European Commission and providing them with further details of this work.”
Meta shares fell nearly 3% following the negative reports to $431 per share.