Meta Platforms Inc.’s Oversight Board couldn’t exactly be called speedy in how it deals with controversial cases, but today the board said that’s all going to change.

It has been two years since Meta, then Facebook Inc., announced that it would introduce a third-party board to oversee how it makes moderation decisions – some of which became hot potatoes in the public discourse.

Notwithstanding the positives to be taken from having moderators at behemoths such as Meta, one of the problems so far is that for a company that has billions of customers, and God only knows how many tricky decisions to make regarding moderation, the board has been very slow going about its work.

Over the two years it has been in existence, it has only published 35 cases in which it gave 186 recommendations to Meta and sometimes advised Meta on its policies. With that in mind, you could call the board somewhat glacial. So today the board announced that it will now take on more cases and it will deal with them faster.

In a post, the board said it will “respond more quickly in situations with urgent real-world consequences” in what it’s calling an expedited process. “We recognize that in urgent situations, acting quickly can maximize our impact,” said the board.

From now on, it will receive cases for an “expedited review,” and if the board takes those cases on, the public will be informed via its website. The board says the members will then move quickly to publish an expedited decision, which might take only as long as 48 hours. In some cases, they might take as much as 30 days – still pretty fast compared with its work in the past. Meta will still have to decide whether to reverse its original decision to take down content and possibly change its policies based on that.

The board also introduced a new member, Kenji Yoshino, a constitutional law professor at New York University School of Law. He is now the 23^rd member of a board whose qualifications span politics, newspaper editorial, human rights, international law and technology regulation.

Photo: Anthony Quintano/Flickr