Oversight Board's ruling is the first major decision as the social media giant seeks to rebrand itself for a MAGA-dominated Washington

- BY NAOMI NIX

Meta's top public policy officials issued an unexpected warning last year to the company's Oversight Board: An upcoming case, involving two videos about trans people, should be treated with extreme sensitivity.

Top executives rarely discuss the inner workings of specific cases with the group, a tribune of journalists, analysts and experts who oversee the social media giant's treatment of controversial posts.

Though the two executives — Joel Kaplan and Nick Clegg, who has since left the company — stopped short of telling the board how to rule, they said the cases were particularly sensitive given the fraught political debate about the rights of trans people in the United States, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

The Oversight Board sided with Meta early Wednesday and ruled that the two posts about trans people didn't violate the company's hate speech rules. The board's decisions on specific cases are considered binding.

The ruling focuses on disparaging comments accompanying two videos, one showing a trans woman using a woman's bathroom and another showing a trans girl winning a female sports competition. The videos and posts responding to them circulated on social media last year. In both cases, Meta determined that while posts about the videos questioned a trans person's gender identity, they didn't violate its rules against hate speech or harassment.

Both posts came to the Oversight Board's attention after being reshared by conservative activist Chay