Move slow, fix things (eventually)įacebook spent two years consulting with experts around the world in everything from internet policy to cybersecurity to anthropology to constitutional law, leading some to criticize it for waiting so long that the board won't hear cases before the US elections in November, as they have with Facebook's recently announced election study. "Nobody wants to hear Facebook saying 'oh, this is hard' and whining, but having a bunch of relatively independent, respected people say, 'look, this is hard, there is no one right answer,' maybe will be a useful educational shift for all of us and how we think about platforms and content moderation," she said. "Whether Facebook applies the rationale decision more broadly depends on whether Facebook deems it 'technically and operationally feasible.'" "The Board's decisions are only binding in a very narrow sense - that is, the individual piece of content (as in, the single post) in question," Evelyn Douek, a lecturer in online speech at Harvard Law School, told Business Insider in an email. That said, if Facebook really disagreed with a specific ruling and decided to ignore it, there's not much the board could do, and a spokesperson for the board declined to comment on what might happen in that scenario. Under the board's charter and bylaws, its decisions on removing or restoring content are binding, and Facebook has gone to great lengths to allow the board to operate legally, financially, and organizationally free from the company's influence. Initial reactions to the idea of the Oversight Board was to question whether it would really be independent, or if Zuckerberg would ultimately hold veto power. That's where Facebook's Oversight Board comes in, according to experts in internet law and policy who have followed its development closely. But given the strong legal protections Facebook and other internet platforms enjoy under " Section 230," a provision in a nearly 25-year-old law that has come under fire from both ends of the political spectrum - albeit for very different reasons - the company is also trying to head off any legislation it might not like. Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal exploded in 2018, Facebook has confronted a stream of controversies around who it allows onto its platforms, what it allows them to post, and how it enforces these rules, from posts that fueled genocide in Myanmar to Russian bot armies to dangerous health-related misinformation that racked up 3.8 billion views in the last year alone.įacing increased pressure from lawmakers, particularly in Europe and the US, Zuckerberg has gradually shifted his posture from saying it was a " crazy idea" that fake news on Facebook influenced the 2016 elections to explicitly asking for more regulation. These policies, like laws passed by some governments, try to strike a balance between goals that often come into conflict with one another, such as protecting free speech and expression while also keeping people safe and delivering reliable information about everything from COVID-19 to elections.Īs Owono acknowledged, the board can't possibly examine every disputed case, but plans to focus on those where there are "significant questions" about freedom of expression, international human rights, or where the content could "have huge impacts - human impact, moral impact, economic impact."įacebook declined to comment for this story. The Oversight Board is an experiment in self-regulation with little precedent and the ambitious aim of resolving some of the many gray areas surrounding Facebook's complex and ever-evolving policies surrounding what content people are allowed to post on its platforms - its so-called " Community Standards" (or Community Guidelines for Instagram). Julie Owono, a human and digital rights lawyer and inaugural board member, told Business Insider in an interview this week that the board hopes, "if things go well, to be able to take cases by mid- to late-October this year." More than two years after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg first floated the idea of an independent "Supreme Court" that could make the final call on difficult content moderation decisions, the company's Oversight Board is finally nearing its launch date. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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