#Facebook oversight board free

The Board should look instead to the many outside people and organizations, including EFF, that have been working in this area, some for decades, for in-depth understanding of the challenges it faces. We are concerned that a Board lacking in content moderation experts will rely on Facebook-a company that has been notoriously opaque about its internal operations-to provide them with knowledge about the practice. Content moderation is an incredibly complex topic and one that is difficult to fully understand, particularly in the face of corporate opacity. While not perfect, these processes create a system of accountability.įinally, Board members need experience with content moderation and its discontents. In well-functioning democracies, judges may be elected directly by voters-and dismissed by them-or appointed by one branch of government but then affirmed by another. Facebook announced the creation of its Oversight Board in 2018, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a note published on the site wrote that Facebook should not make so many important decisions about. Part of the difficulty here is that Facebook has tried to replicate the concept of the court but removed a crucial aspect of many court systems: the checks and balances built into the appointment of judges. concerns, such as alleged moderation of conservative speakers, than other issues that are far more globally relevant-such as the frequent removal of documentation of human rights violations or the inconsistent enforcement of the rules. Although the Oversight Board is designed to identify and decide the most globally significant disputes, the Board in its current composition seems more directed at addressing parochial U.S. And we don’t see much representation of Internet users who create the content at issue. We don’t see any LGBTQ advocates, transgender Board members, or disability advocates. We see too few individuals from certain regions-such as the Middle East and North Africa and Southeast Asia. As Kara Swisher remarked in the New York Times, “here are no loudmouths, no cranky people and, most important, no one truly affected by the dangerous side of Facebook.” We’re also concerned about who’s not on the Board. Many members seem to have general experience with law or institution-building, which may be helpful, but we’re not seeing much specific experience with international human rights frameworks. And yet, twenty-five percent of the initial Board is composed of Americans, with still others located or working in the United States.

Content moderation errors disproportionately impact vulnerable communities- many of which are located outside of the United States. Now that the Board’s first members have been announced, we have new concerns. And, given the tiny percentage of disputes the Board will address, we doubt that it will make much of a dent in the universe of content moderation failures. It doesn't matter if it's your own content that might have been removed, or if it's someone else's that has. You can contact the board if you're unhappy with a content-related decision made by Facebook or Instagram. But no amount of “oversight” can fix the underlying problem: Content moderation is extremely difficult to get right, particularly at Facebook scale. The Oversight Board is an independent body that decides what content on Facebook and Instagram should either be removed or kept up. We’ll follow closely and keep open minds, because we appreciate it is a first attempt at some semblance of much-needed governance and external review. They say Facebook’s official board can’t act fast enough to make meaningful change, and is limited to content that Facebook originally took down, not posts that are still up.We’ve been skeptical of Facebook’s Oversight Board from day one. A group of prominent figures, including Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Lincoln Project co-founder Reed Galen, have even created their own group called the Real Facebook Oversight Board. Though the board is independent, and Facebook has promised to comply with its decisions, some say the Oversight Board still isn’t enough to combat misinformation and hate speech. In its first set of rulings released this week, the board found that Facebook mistakenly took down posts in five out of six cases.

#Facebook oversight board free

The board says their mission is to “support people’s right to free expression” by upholding or reversing Facebook’s content decisions. The 20-person panel includes academics and other experts, such as the former prime minister of Denmark, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, and Director of Stanford University’s Constitutional Law Center Michael McConnell. Facebook’s Oversight Board was established in 2019 in response to widespread criticism of the social network’s moderation policies.