Meta's anti-politics position may prove to cause it as much grief as its decision to open the platform to political discussion, with more questions being raised as to how the company determines what is "political" and what is not and how that affects the user experience.

This week, Meta's independent Oversight Board asked questions about Meta's over-enforcement of its posting rules

According to the Oversight Board:

"In August 2024, a Facebook user shared a Photoshopped image based on the poster of the 1994 comedy film "Dumb and Dumber." The manipulated version contains the faces of the original movie's actors replaced by the U.S. presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The post was captioned with the following emojis "???? ‍♂️????????. Meta had initially taken the user's post down from Facebook based on its Bullying and Harassment Community Standard, which bars "derogatory sexualized photoshop or drawings."

The case came to the company's attention through the Board after the user appealed Meta's ruling to take away their content to the Board.

Meta then deemed its removal to be wrong and restored the post to Facebook.

It may note in summary that the Oversight Board identifies "overenforcement of Meta's Bullying and Harassment policy with respect to satire and political speech", and the dangers that such may pose in the context of an election, "as it may lead to the excessive removal of political speech and undermine the ability to criticize government officials and political candidates, including in a sarcastic manner.".

Therefore, in this case, Meta did not claim that the content was taken down on account of its clampdown on political speech. However, the concern is that this anti-politics push from Meta will eventually limit users from sharing their ideas about the events around the world, and politics, specifically, due to Meta's enforcement of such content being turned up a notch.

The same might also be said for Meta's Twitter rival, Threads, which has faced intense criticism for its allergic reaction to political content. As the U.S. is focused on today, being just days away from an election, then logically, Threads should contain quite a bit of political content, in reflection of the news of the day, but Meta's stated aversion to such is constraining real-time discussion of some of the most critical news of the moment.

That's probably going to suppress growth of Threads as a hub of central news source, which was part of the larger appeal with Twitter. Under Elon Musk, Twitter (now X), has moved further right into conspiracy theories and supporting the Republican agenda, and many are looking for an alternative source of getting minute-by-minute coverage of the latest news about everything political.

Threads, at this point, is failing on this front, which may eventually force Meta to rethink its suppression of political content, at least at the context of Threads.

There's again, what Meta considers "political", as the company remains vague in describing its parameters.

That's stirring up a growing backlash in the app over its heavy-handed enforcement, which again points to concerns about its future growth.

And yet even as Meta moves away from political and news content, governments are still trying to devise ways to make it pay news publishers.

In Australia, reportedly the government is now weighing reforms over its contentious "Media Bargaining Code," which would force Meta and Google to pay a tax, channeled to publications "to fund public interest journalism.".

The Australia Media Bargaining Code was instituted, for the first place, to ensure that online platforms do pay local publishers for the benefit they garner from users engaging with news content in their apps. Still, Meta has long argued that the very basis of this equation is wrong; its apps deliver benefit to publications, and not the other way around.

This, in concert with other comparable initiatives in other countries, has forced Meta to cut off news publishers both in Australia and Canada, to drive the point, though this is one of the primary reasons it has resorted to its broader steps to de-prioritize the content of news, all together to avoid such conflicts.

Instead, the company is deriving much more engagement from entertainment-based content through Reels, which, based on AI-based recommendations, are being pushed at a record-high rate to users. So Meta literally doesn't need news content yet, governments continue to look for ways to force the company to pay up even while it implements this broader strategic shift.

So is it worth it then for Meta to avoid politics, in order to limit backlash and regulatory scrutiny?

In the context of Instagram I can see it, and Facebook as well to some extent, and the engagement numbers from both suggest that they're doing just fine with less political discussion.

But as a real-time social app, which Threads is bound to become, I do not know if it's even possible or feasible to curb some of those discussions, and surely not under such imprecise terms that are vague to the user. The thing is, it was actually journalists and news breakers that made Twitter, and those are the same people Meta needs to have posting to Threads. And with only a fifth of Twitter users ever posting anything at all, there's only a finite number of contributors that Meta can alienate before it comes off the rails. Perhaps Meta will have a change of heart after the elections, but for now, questions on how it enforces these are increasing, and may become a bigger issue.