Meta commits $13 million to sustain Oversight Board operations through 2028
The additional capital ensures the board’s financial stability as it navigates complex governance challenges and recent rebukes regarding the dismantling of fact-checking operations.
Meta has committed an additional $13 million in funding to its independent Oversight Board, securing the financial resources necessary to sustain operations through 2028. The announcement, confirmed by co-chair Paolo Carozza, ensures that the watchdog retains the capital required to manage its ongoing mandate of reviewing complex content moderation cases across the company’s platforms.
Carozza noted that the funds would be deposited directly into the board’s trust, reinforcing its operational independence. He highlighted that Meta continues to refer significant moderation disputes to the body and actively responds to its recommendations, a process that remains central to the platform’s governance structure despite recent policy shifts.
This latest commitment builds upon a financial framework established in 2024, when Meta pledged to allocate at least $30 million annually to the Oversight Board over a three-year period. The new injection of capital underscores the company’s continued reliance on the external body to adjudicate high-stakes content decisions, even as the broader social media sector faces intensifying pressure to balance free speech with misinformation controls and artificial intelligence integration.
The funding news arrives against a backdrop of significant friction between Meta and its watchdog. In April 2025, the Oversight Board issued a sharp rebuke of the company for “hastily” dismantling its U.S. fact-checking operations and easing restrictions on contentious topics, including immigration and gender identity. These policy changes were initiated by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in January 2025, who argued that previous moderation efforts had resulted in excessive censorship.
The restructuring of content policies, which included the adoption of a crowdsourced “community notes” system, was widely interpreted as an effort to mitigate conservative criticism and align with the political landscape of the incoming Trump administration. Despite these tensions, the board retains the authority to issue binding decisions on content issues, maintaining its role as a critical check on Meta’s editorial discretion.
