DUBAI: The Meta Oversight Board announced on Thursday that it agreed with Meta’s decision to take down an Instagram post showing a beautician in Iran preparing a 14-year-old girl for her wedding.
However, the board disagreed with Meta’s reason for removal, which was “a spirit of the policy allowance under the human exploitation policy,” according to a statement.
In January, a video was posted on Instagram showing a beautician offering make-up advice to a 14-year-old girl in preparation for her wedding. The young girl confirmed her age in the video and the text said that she was the youngest bride of the year, while the caption provided information about the salon and its beauty services.
The post was viewed about 10.9 million times and reported by 203 users over a month.
The board said that Meta’s human exploitation policy does not specifically prohibit support for child marriage; instead, its goal is to remove all forms of “exploitation of humans,” which Meta believed should include “support” for child marriage.
However, the board disagrees with Meta’s reasoning because it believes “the beautician’s actions were a form of facilitation” and therefore, the content clearly violates the human exploitation community standard rule “for facilitation of child marriage by materially aiding this harmful practice.”
In Iran, child marriage is allowed, with legal ages set at 13 for girls and 15 for boys, although in some cases marriage is permitted even before children reach the set ages.
The UN defines child marriage as “any marriage where at least one of the parties is under 18 years of age” and it is considered a form of forced marriage, both of which are human rights violations.
The Oversight Board, therefore, recommended that Meta modify the human exploitation policy to explicitly state that forced marriages include child marriage, and to define child marriage in line with international human rights standards.
It also advised Meta to expand the “definition of ‘facilitation’ in internal guidelines to include the provision of any type of material aid (which includes ‘services’) to enable exploitation.”
