The Meta Oversight Board Has Some Genuinely Smart Suggestions

A little more than 14 months after The Wall Street Journal first published the “Facebook Files”—the reporting series that exposed the inner workings of the site’s content-moderation practices—the Meta Oversight Board has finally released its opinion on the controversial and opaque cross-check program that gave preferential treatment to certain users of the site, even when they openly flouted the site’s community standards.

For months, online-speech experts worried that the board’s decision would fall short by recommending the oversimplified solution of terminating the program entirely, or suggesting nonspecific methods of reform. But the opinion, which lays out, according to the board, more than two dozen concrete steps for which types of entities can qualify for such protections—and who will select them—exceeded expectations, offering serious guidance for one of online speech’s toughest questions.