In seeking to fix one unprecedented problem, Facebook has proposed an unprecedented, and perhaps impossible, solution. After all, arguably Facebook's biggest problem when it comes to content moderation decisions is not how it's making the decisions or who's making them, but just how many decisions there are to make on a platform of its size. But no team, no matter the size or scope, could ever adequately consider every viewpoint represented on Facebook. That's not to say there isn't value in having an extra set of eyes on decisions that Facebook's far-flung moderators sometimes make in a matter of minutes if not seconds. There's no reason to think Facebook's board wouldn't be plagued by the same ideological infighting.
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Even the nine justices of the Supreme Court, who are confirmed only after a centuries-old bipartisan vetting process in Congress, are largely defined today by their partisan allegiances, making some of their most consequential decisions appear to be little more than a numbers game. The very fact that the company is seeking a diversity of viewpoints all but ensures there will be disagreements about who qualifies-and that's before they've cast a single vote. It's already been repeatedly ridiculed for enlisting the conservative Heritage Foundation to assess allegations of partisan bias on the platform. In doing so, it's also opening itself up to a new wave of criticism about which 40 experts it considers to be worthy of the public trust. With the board, Facebook is designing oversight in its own image. A ProPublica tool that collected information on political ad targeting recently broke after Facebook changed its API in what the company says was a security measure.
Facebook oversight cracked#
Meanwhile, Facebook has cracked down on outside efforts to monitor what's happening on the platform. But even this attempt at outside supervision is still largely under Facebook's control. For a company more accustomed to moving fast and breaking things, such considered outreach to the public is certainly a welcome change. Over the next several months, Facebook plans to hold workshops in Singapore, Delhi, Nairobi, Berlin, New York, Mexico City, and other cities around the world, where they'll solicit feedback about this proposal. And its decisions would affect the world's 2.3 billion Facebook users, a population that's roughly seven times the size of the United States.
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This board would be choosing not from thousands of cases each term but potentially several million cases every week. In its charter, the company suggests creating a body of up to 40 "independent experts" to review Facebook's most contentious content moderation decisions, in order to cast the final vote on whether a given post or comment should stay or go and how that should alter Facebook's policies in the future.
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The court takes up just about 80 of them.Ĭontrast that with what Facebook is trying to do. Up to 8,000 cases are filed with the Supreme Court each term. That's 325 million people whose beliefs and values may vary, but who are all subject to the same set of laws, who largely speak the same language, and who share at least some cultural norms or heritage.
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With the US Supreme Court, the founding fathers created an über-powerful judicial body to enforce a constitution that now governs 325 million residents of the United States. Much of it is still undecided, but one thing is clear: To compare Facebook's board to the Supreme Court is to minimize the sheer complexity of what Facebook is setting out to accomplish. On Monday, Facebook released a draft charter answering questions about how such an institution might function. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for one, compared the would-be governing body to the Supreme Court, in its potential capacity to review the biggest issues of the day and set a sort of Facebook case law. When Facebook announced in November that it would launch an independent oversight board, questions arose about what that might look like and how it would work.