Supervisory Board Suggests Meta-Owned Social Media Ban Unauthorized Dissemination Of Personal Information

The Meta Oversight Board made its first suggestion of the year. (photo: doc. unsplash)

JAKARTA - Facebook's parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., should not allow users to share someone's personal residential information on its platform. Even when the information is publicly available. This was confirmed by Meta's supervisory board in its first policy advisory opinion, this year.

The board also recommended that Meta create a communication channel so that so-called doxxing victims could better explain their case to the company.

Doxxing is the public release of sensitive information that identifies an individual or organization, such as a home address or telephone number. This can lead to harassment or stalking.

Celebrities and private individuals have been affected by such sharing of information. This raises issues around privacy, the public interest, and civic activism. In a recent high-profile or high-profile case, Harry Potter novelist JK Rowling accused trans activists of lying to her by posting a photo of her home on Twitter.

Meta's independent supervisory board, which includes academics, rights experts and lawyers, has been set up by Meta to decide a small portion of difficult content moderation appeals, but can also advise on site policy.

Last year, Meta sought the opinion of the council's policy advisors on when addresses and pictures of private residences could be published on Facebook and Instagram.

The current Meta Rules say users may not share "personally identifiable information about yourself or others". However, Meta may allow content such as a person's address to be posted if it is deemed "publicly available."

According to the board, Meta's internal guidelines for content reviewers say information published by at least five news outlets or available through various public records, does not count as private.

The board said Meta should remove these exceptions and should ensure exceptions for newsworthy content should be applied consistently. They also say Meta should allow external images of private residences, when the property is the focus of news, though not to organize protests against residents.

This is the first time that Meta's supervisory board has responded to a request for an unrelated policy advisory opinion. Meta has 60 days to publicly respond.

Meta's supervisory board, which has ruled on cases such as the suspension of former US President Donald Trump, has so far overturned Meta content decisions in 17 of 22 cases.

Twitter has also recently expanded its own privacy rules to prohibit sharing private individual images and videos without people's consent, but they quickly acknowledged the new policy was being abused by bad actors and that the company's enforcement team had made a mistake.