A new era of social media governance began Wednesday, when the first 20 members of Facebook’s long-awaited oversight board were announced. The international panel of free expression advocates, journalists, a former prime minister, a Nobel laureate, and law professors will have final say over certain content moderation decisions for the world’s largest social media platform, independent of Facebook’s executives and staff.
This limited transfer of power to an independent entity represents something of a sea change for a company that has since its founding been under the tight control of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is chairman of the board and controls a majority of the company’s voting shares.
But will Facebook’s oversight board live up to its lofty promises and reshape how Facebook shapes the world? Or will it just be a reputational shield for a company whose pathologies run deeper than the question of whether individual pieces of content should be allowed or taken down?
“We are all committed to freedom of expression within the framework of international norms of human rights,” the four co-chairs of the board – Catalina Botero-Marino, Jamal Greene, Michael W McConnell and Helle Thorning-Schmidt – wrote in a New York Times op-ed introducing themselves to the public Wednesday. “We will make decisions based on those principles and on the effects on Facebook users and society, without regard to the economic, political or reputational interests of the company.”
“I wish I could say that the Facebook review board was cosmetic, but I’m not even sure that it’s that deep,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and author of a book on Facebook. “If Facebook really wanted to take outside criticism seriously at any point in the past decade, it could have taken human rights activists seriously about problems in Myanmar; it could have taken journalists seriously about problems in the Philippines; it could have taken legal scholars seriously about the way it deals with harassment; and it could have taken social media scholars seriously about the ways that it undermines democracy in India and Brazil. But it didn’t. This is greenwashing.”
The board’s initial work will be to review appeals of Facebook’s content takedowns, and it will be empowered to overrule decisions made by Facebook’s army of content moderators or executives.
In this way, the board appears designed to address the kind of controversies that Facebook has faced over content with journalistic, historic or artistic merit that nevertheless violates the company’s advertiser-friendly “community standards”, such as the international outcry over its censorship of the “Napalm girl” photograph in 2016 or the years-long legal dispute over its shuttering of the account of a Frenchman who had posted Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World. Other pressing issues that could face the panel include content from anti-vaccine activists, conspiracy theorists or rightwing extremists who have become adept at gaming the platform’s rules.
“Facebook is a company that was made by brilliant engineers, and they were extremely good at that, and then they discovered that they were going to have to make complex decisions that would tax anyone, that were moral, legal, ethical, about privacy,” said Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian and a member of the new oversight board. “Those are decisions that newspaper editors make every day of our lives.”
But Vaidhyanathan argued that such questions are insignificant compared to Facebook’s power to amplify certain content over other content. And while Facebook has said that it may expand the scope of the oversight board’s decision making to other policy areas, it is unlikely that the board’s power will extend to re-tuning Facebook’s algorithms.
“The power of Facebook is its ability to choose what everyone sees,” said Vaidhyanathan. “It’s not that it gets to choose what you post.”
Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center and an expert on media manipulation, raised concerns that the board would become “weaponized” by bad actors, who will use it as another opportunity to get their issues into the press.
“This theory of oversight is heavily informed by legal scholarship, which is slow and administrative and technical in nature, when we need something much more suited to the speed of the technology itself,” she said. “They’re going forward with this really long drawn out procedural mechanism that doesn’t address what the problem is – which is that viral content only needs to be on the internet for 4-8 hours for it to do its damage.”
Looking at the scale of the “infodemic” facing Facebook amid the coronavirus pandemic, Donovan said that the much more pressing concern is to solve the problem of “information curation, especially in a place like Facebook, that helps guide the user toward correct content and information rather than putting them in the middle a landfill and saying, ‘You sort it out’.” The oversight board is ultimately a distraction from “what really needs to happen”, she said, “which is to design technology that doesn’t allow for the expansive amplification of disinformation and health misinformation”.
The board’s makeup tends heavily toward legal experts and leaders, and Claire Wardle, the director of First Draft and an expert in misinformation, said she hopes they will bring on more “practitioners” in the future. “These are not people who have gotten down and dirty in closed Facebook groups with conspiracy theorists,” she said.
Still, Wardle said she was cautiously optimistic about the concept of the board and pleased with the caliber of its initial members, whose reputational heft could shift the power imbalance that Facebook’s critics have often faced.
“These people have too much reputational capital to lose to just do Facebook’s bidding,” she said.
Rusbridger also expressed measured optimism about the board’s potential to make a real difference. “If [Facebook] were being Machiavellian and this was just a fig leaf to do business as usual, you could have picked people that would have given you a quieter life.”