On Monday, the Meta (META.O) Oversight Board reversed the firm’s choice to take down a post on Facebook that used the phrase “death to Khamenei” to criticise the Iranian president, finding that the post hadn’t yet breached the law against conveying violent threats.
The slogan is commonly used to imply “down with Khamenei” while referring to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has been directing a fatal crackdown on protests across the country in recent months, according to the board, which is sponsored by Meta but functions autonomously.
It also advised the firm to adopt more efficient strategies for incorporating relevant context into its content regulations and to indicate clearly when expressing threatened remarks about heads of state was acceptable.
“In the context of the post and the broader social, political and linguistic situation in Iran, ‘marg bar Khamenei’ should be understood as ‘down with.’ It is a rhetorical, political slogan, not a credible threat,” the board wrote.
Since the middle of September, Iran has been shaken by protests in response to the death in the confinement of a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who was seized for wearing “inappropriate attire” in violations of the nation’s strict dress code for women.
The rallies, in which protesters from all types of society urged the removal of Iran’s theocracy, have confronted the Islamic Republic’s administration with one of its greatest significant problems since the 1979 revolution.
For Meta, which has missed often in its regulation of violent political discourse on its sites, the disturbance produced a now-familiar dilemma.
The firm prohibits “serious violence” language but tries to prevent excess by restricting implementation to credible threats, allowing space for interpretation as to when and how the policy is to be imposed.
For instance, after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Meta granted a brief exclusion to allow violent threats towards Russian President Vladimir Putin in an attempt to provide people in the area a place to convey their frustration over the crisis.
Days later, ever since Reuters disclosed the exemption’s existence, it changed its mind.
In addition, Meta has been targeted for the way its sites were utilised for organising the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Just before the incident, statements like “kill them all” and violent threats towards certain American political figures could be found in thousands of Facebook groups with a U.S. theme.
Death to Khamenei threats was different from those received around January 6, based on the Oversight Board, since politicians were then “clearly at risk” in the U.S. context and “death to” was not a rhetorical phrase.
