Facebook Forms Independent Board to Oversee Content Decisions -- Update
September 17 2019 - 5:59PM
Dow Jones News
By Jeff Horwitz
Facebook Inc. will give an independent board the ability to
review and potentially overturn content-moderation decisions, the
social-network operator said Tuesday, giving authority to outsiders
to oversee some of the thorniest issues the company has faced in
recent years.
The new board, which will be funded through an outside trust,
will consist of 40 paid, part-time members who will "seek to
consider cases that have the greatest potential to guide future
decisions and policies, " the board's charter states.
Acting functionally as an appellate court, board members will
adjudicate controversies arising from Facebook's in-house efforts
to enforce its standards on hate speech, misinformation and other
prohibited content. After hearing cases in five-person panels, the
full board will make binding decisions on specific pieces of
content as well as issue broader policy recommendations that the
company must publicly address.
Initial board members will be announced within the next few
months, with review panels aiming to begin issuing decisions on
content by early next year, Facebook said.
"As an independent organization, we hope it gives people
confidence that their views will be heard, and that Facebook
doesn't have the ultimate power over their expression," Chief
Executive Mark Zuckerberg said of the initiative, which he proposed
last year. "I'm looking forward to seeing how the board
evolves."
The question of content moderation has bedeviled Twitter Inc.
and Google's YouTube as well, with social-media platforms taking
heat both for their failure to staff moderation efforts adequately
and for sometimes overreaching on particular decisions.
Though Facebook began with a broad and permissive approach to
speech, the company has had to change its content policies
frequently in response to bruising criticism by news outlets,
national governments and its 2.3 billion users world-wide.
Among the controversies the company has faced: whether to treat
an iconic photograph of a naked Vietnamese child fleeing a napalm
bombing as child pornography; whether a woman's live streaming of
her boyfriend's death at the hands of police should be taken down;
and whether conspiracy theorist and far-right talk show host Alex
Jones should remain on the platform.
In designing the oversight board's framework, Facebook held six
workshops, hosted 22 roundtable events, conducted 250 one-on-one
interviews and reviewed 1,200 written comments.
Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John's University in New
York who Facebook allowed to sit in on portions of the oversight
board's creation process, said a recurring point of tension was
whether the board could set policy rather than simply ruling on
whether content violated Facebook's standards.
"People said, 'Yes, we want the board to be able to dictate
policy more directly,'" she said, adding that Facebook was
initially reluctant to turn over that much power. "What if the
board came back and said, 'We want you to get rid of News Feed,
News Feed is destroying democracy?'" she asked, referring to the
stream of posts that has become the core of the Facebook
platform.
Nonetheless, Ms. Klonick called the requirement that Facebook
publicly respond to the board's policy recommendations an
unprecedented step, as the company has traditionally responded to
complaints from users, civil society and groups in private, if at
all.
"That's a huge moment of accountability and transparency they
haven't had," she said.
While Facebook's announcement marks its most concrete
description of its plan for independent content adjudication to
date, key details remain unsettled. Facebook plans to name 11
initial board members later this year, and those people will in
turn help to select additional members. Potential members could be
drawn from the ranks of academia as well as judges, Facebook group
moderators and former journalists. Facebook will accept nominations
from the public.
How much board members will be paid and the size of the board's
operating budget haven't been determined. Facebook said only that
it is spending millions of dollars on the effort.
In a call with reporters Tuesday, Facebook governance and global
affairs director Brent Harris said the group's membership will
reflect their independence and the breadth of Facebook's geographic
reach. Board members will include "some who hold real criticism as
to the way we've operated," he said. "We fully anticipate the board
will overturn us."
Until its initial board members have had time to hire a
permanent staff, Facebook may lend it employees. If the initiative
succeeds, other platforms, both those owned by Facebook such as
Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as competitors including Snap Inc.
and Twitter, could eventually opt in.
"We've set up so that the trust can accommodate other social
media platforms if they want to join," Mr. Harris said.
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 17, 2019 17:44 ET (21:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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