Meta's oversight board has told Instagram to reinstate a clip of drill music originally removed from Instagram at the request of the Metropolitan police. The clip, a short excerpt of the song Secrets Not Safe by Chinx (OS) , was removed
after the Met flagged the track to Meta, arguing that it could lead to retaliatory violence in the context of the London gang scene. The force told Meta it contained a veiled threat, referencing a shooting in 2017, and as a result the company
manually removed 52 posts containing the track and automated systems removed it a further 112 times. Now, the oversight board says those removals were a mistake. The track does not break Facebook or Instagram's rules, it argues, and basic principles
of free speech, equality and transparency were breached in allowing a police operation to censor a musician in secret. As part of its investigation into the removal of the track, the oversight board filed multiple freedom of information requests with
the Met police, finding that the force had filed 286 requests to take down or review posts about drill music in the 12 months from June 2021, and that 255 of those had resulted in the removal of content. | 
