Facebook Forms Independent Board to Oversee Content Decisions
September 17 2019 - 5:11PM
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.
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz @wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 17, 2019 16:56 ET (20:56 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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