To date, Facebook’s attempts to produce a “scalable” content moderation strategy for global speech has been a miserable failure, as it was always doomed to be, because speech is culturally sensitive and context specific.Īfter a decade of denying Facebook was responsible for, or even capable of, making content decisions beyond the broadest sweep of generalised rules, Mark Zuckerberg has shifted the company more into the territory of all historic media powers: making arbitrary decisions on hot topics in step with the prevailing cultural and political forces of the time. And, most importantly, it is a mechanism through which to respond to the kind of public pressure that is a drain on management time, provokes congressional hearings, and upsets employees.
#FACEBOOK OVERSIGHT BOARD HOW TO#
In the Oversight Board it has a backstop for the kind of decisions the company cannot scale and smoothly enact across the world: which politicians’ accounts to take down and which to leave up how to deal with certain persistent harassers who are ruled not to breach policy whether to take down offensive material in one country but leave it up in another.
There is not much transparency around the internal machinations between Facebook executives and the Oversight Board.įacebook’s content decisions are increasingly its brand. It acts as a taste-making panel for the rest of the company and cover for more granular issues that will continue to dog any social platform. It shifts focus and responsibility for all key moderation decisions to “experts”.
It sits separately from the main business of the organisation – advertising. The Facebook Oversight Board was set up as a “supreme court” but its role in refining what can and cannot be left on the site is far more like an editorial board at a newspaper. The shift is not unexpected though: legal scholar Kate Klonick wrote in the New Yorker that an expansion of this kind would happen in “mid 2021”, but the timing seems more than coincidental to the Trump decision. The expansion of the board’s power comes at a time when it has barely cleared its throat on operational matters: it has made seven decisions, with a big one pending. Now Facebook will make decisions on what it keeps and what it deletes in step with the decisions of an elite board, paid and protected by the company but operating “independently”. With the Oversight Board, the uncomfortable decisions about which controversial material to leave up and what to take down is partly removed from the hands of Facebook policymakers, the executive leadership and the low-paid human moderation staff, and given to a panel of respected experts who become the editorial tone-setters for global media. Before that, Facebook also announced the expansion of the Oversight Board’s remit: initially users could only appeal to have content restored after moderators removed it – now the board will also examine appeals over content that has been left up on Facebook or Instagram following a review by moderators. We thank the board for the care and attention it gave this case.A ny day now the Facebook Oversight Board, the social media company’s review mechanism for decisions on deletion of content and users, will tell the world whether Donald Trump should remain banned from Facebook indefinitely. While these recommendations are not binding, we actively sought the board’s views on our policies around political figures and will carefully review its recommendations.
The board also made a number of recommendations on how we should improve our policies. We will now consider the board’s decision and determine an action that is clear and proportionate. Instead, the board criticized the open-ended nature of the suspension, calling it an “indeterminate and standardless penalty,” and insisted we review our response. Trump’s accounts, it has not specified the appropriate duration of the penalty. However, while the board has not required Facebook to immediately restore Mr. As we stated in January, we believe our decision was necessary and right, and we’re pleased the board has recognized that the unprecedented circumstances justified the exceptional measure we took. Today, the Oversight Board upheld Facebook’s suspension of former US President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. Note: For future Facebook updates about Oversight Board cases, please visit the Transparency Center.
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