Report from MediaPost
In Brief – Meta has agreed to provide the Oversight Board, an independent organization it created in 2020 to review content moderation decisions across Meta’s platforms, an additional $13 million in “top up” funding to support its operations through 2028. The money will be placed in the Board’s trust. Created by Facebook in 2020, the Oversight Board is made up of legal, digital rights, free speech, and human rights experts from around the world, and is empowered to review Meta content moderation cases to promote fair and transparent decisions. It has issued more than 300 recommendations to Meta, with the company implementing roughly three-quarters of them. The new funding builds on substantial previous commitments from Meta, including $150 million in 2022, $130 million at the Board’s inception, and a pledge in 2024 to provide at least $30 million annually over three years. The funding comes despite recent tensions between the two organizations. Some Board members criticized Meta’s changes to fact checking and content moderation practices in 2025, even as Meta has adopted some Oversight Board recommendations, such as revising how it labels AI-generated and manipulated content.
Context – As President Trump was preparing to re-enter the White House in January 2025, Meta announced big content moderation changes, including eliminating official fact-checkers and replacing them with an X-style community notes program, and changing its speech codes and automated filters to relax limits on language and commentary some call hate speech. Following the news, the Oversight Board’s co-chairs released a statement saying that they looked forward to working with Meta to ensure “its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.” The Global Coalition for Tech Justice, an international alliance of progressive Big Tech critics, eventually released an open letter calling on the Meta Oversight Board to resign en masse to protest Meta changes that the coalition claimed allowed for hate speech targeting “marginalized groups”. This news is a reminder that the unique quasi-independent organization does still exist.