OPINION:
Earlier this month, Meta’s Oversight Board ordered the platform to restore a video uploaded by a citizen-run Cuban news platform on the one-year anniversary of the July 11 protests, during which thousands of dissenting Cubans were brutally repressed.
In the video, a woman could be seen urging other women to protest the regime using dehumanizing language, calling men “rats” and “mares” carrying human waste. Meta would be wise to follow the Board’s decision, as the video was a legitimate display of frustration whose free circulation is essential in authoritarian regimes like Cuba.
Months after it was uploaded, Meta removed the video, deeming it a violation of the platform’s hate speech policy. The Oversight Board — created to adjudicate difficult content decisions — overturned that decision earlier this month, reasoning that in closed civic spaces, “it is critical that social media protects the users’ voice” and that the video intended to express frustration rather than to demean.
Exercising free speech comes at an immense cost in Cuba, where any form of opposition to the regime is ruthlessly stifled. During the July 11 protests alone, the regime arbitrarily arrested over 1,400 people, indicted 790, and, by March 2022, had sentenced at least 128 to prison sentences of up to 30 years.
For years, Reporters Without Borders has ranked Cuba as “the worst country for press freedom in Latin America” and one of the world’s most hostile places for independent journalism in the world — forcing independent journalists like Washington Post columnist Abraham Jiménez to make the stark choice of prison or exile.
Against this backdrop, the video should be seen as a legitimate display of frustration towards an overtly repressive regime that restricts every potential avenue for free and critical expression. While perhaps inappropriate in a free, democratic country, such expressions should be permitted in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes. In these countries, crass or shocking language is borne out of living under extremely repressive conditions, and their free circulation has the social benefit of enabling opinions and ideas to reach the public that would otherwise not be known to the outside world and to the very people living in the country.
Social media platforms are often the only place where people living under authoritarian rule can criticize or question a regime’s repression. Other outlets for political expression are severely limited or simply non-existent. The Cuban regime, for example, owns and controls all media outlets and has prohibited privately owned outlets in its Constitution, making independent media illegal in the country.
In Cuba, Facebook, in particular, has become a crucial space for Cubans to connect, organize and defy the regime. In fact, it was a post on a Facebook group that sparked the nationwide protests on July 11, 2021. Throughout the protests, Facebook live videos, groups, and chat services provided a limited but vital avenue for individuals to express themselves.
Under these precarious circumstances, removing online speech limits the efficacy of an essential platform for expression and incidentally bolsters the existing regime’s censorship efforts. Meta’s decision to remove the video is indicative of its failure to factor in contextual and linguistic elements in its hate speech policy — something that Meta has long struggled with. For instance, Meta’s failure to consider the complexity of Arabic dialects led it to flag and ban posts documenting human rights abuses during the 2021 Israel-Palestine crisis in a terrorism screening error.
Although the Board’s recommendations are non-binding, and Meta can refuse to implement the Board’s decision when it “could violate the law,” Meta should respect the Board’s decision — something Meta has not always done. Just recently, Meta and the Board had a standoff in a case concerning Cambodia’s former Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Meta would also do well to implement the Board’s long-standing recommendation to use specialized staff and improve its incorporation of context and language expertise. This would involve enhancing language processing algorithms, hiring more moderators from underrepresented regions, and training them in appropriate dialects and contextual expertise.
Such changes would pave the way for content moderation to be more sensitive to the contextual complexities of different regions and landscapes. It would help to safeguard the limited avenues for dissent and organization of protests in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes — where it’s needed most.
- Hannah Van Dijcke is an International Legal Associate with the Human Rights Foundation.
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