Even Meta's Oversight Board thinks its rules for banning accounts are baffling

Key points

• Over the last five years, Meta's Oversight Board has weighed in on everything from Donald Trump's Facebook suspension to AI deepfakes.
• Now the board is wading into another thorny issue: Meta's rules for disabling users' accounts.
• The board announced earlier this year that it would look into improving transparency around the process, which is often frustratingly opaque.
• The oversight group dug into the issue following a referral from Meta regarding an Instagram account with 70,000 followers that was banned after making threatening posts targeting a journalist.
• In its decision, the Oversight Board says that Meta was correct to ban the account, but the case raised "serious questions" about the company's handling of such behavior and "due process concerns" around how it disables accounts.