Mark Zuckerberg gives the keynote speech at Facebook’s yearly F8 event in 2018. Photo courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.
By Annabelle Mackson ’23
Staff Writer
Unbiased content moderation has been in the limelight since former U.S. President Donald Trump was permanently banned from Twitter and Facebook in early January. This action came directly from executives Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg of Twitter and Facebook, respectively. While they were well within their rights to ban Trump, their actions raised the concern that private companies could ban any individual they did not agree with. However, Dorsey and Zuckerberg have no desire to be in control of their platforms in that way.
For Zuckerberg, this issue has been on his mind for a couple of years now. In 2018, he approved the creation of the Facebook oversight board after the concept was suggested to him by Noah Feldmand, a professor at Harvard Law. This quasi-judiciary would operate much in the same way as the U.S. Supreme Court, but would have representatives from around the world. The first members of the board were appointed in 2020, and the board made decisions on its first cases in early 2021. It is still unknown whether or not this oversight board will actually be unbiased or, at the very least, successful.
It’s really too soon to tell. As of this year, the board has just started seeing cases, and they are not yet fully staffed. The planned number of board members is 40, and there are currently 19. The oversight board website states that members were appointed from around the globe to reflect the diverse population represented on Facebook and that the current “members were chosen because they are experienced at deliberating thoughtfully and collegially, skilled at making and explaining decisions based on a set of policies or principles, and familiar with digital content and governance.” They also acknowledge that special consideration was taken with individuals who had had prior experience in content moderation and conflict resolution. Facebook selected a group of co-chairs — kept anonymous — and “the co-chairs and Facebook will then jointly select candidates for the remainder of the board seats.” Each board member only serves a three-year term. A note in the board’s favor is that Zuckerberg cannot overrule their decisions, which so far seems to be a great check on his power as CEO.
There is a concern that the board will be hand-picked to think about and respond to problems in a particular way, but this hasn’t yet posed an issue. The oversight board has the power to call in experts in the field they are covering if they do not have enough experience to accurately make a ruling on a case, and the general public has the ability to nominate potential members. The nominations are through a portal run by Chicago law firm Baker Mackenzie and, as mentioned above, the current members of the board are the ones to appoint more members. A lot of the press circulating about the oversight board has been, as is the case with much of the news these days, very sensational and doesn’t get into the meat and potatoes of the board’s actual intent and function. The operations of the oversight board are only now making headlines, but this wasn’t something that was thought up overnight. Even with the current social media environment accelerating its conception, the board had two years of planning and deliberation, and it’s still not at its full capacity.
While it certainly should still be held under some form of scrutiny for its first years of operation, the oversight board is not the elusive social media roundtable that it was first made out to be. The somewhat shady past dealings of Facebook regarding the safety of private information made the general public immediately critical of the oversight board. It seemed that many people, myself included, thought it was going to consist of a room of high-powered executives hand-picked by Mark Zuckerburg to make decisions that would affect the rest of the world. However, the board made an effort to be transparent from the beginning. Not only is their website regularly updated with the board’s decisions, but the fact that members have term limits and can be nominated by the public is a huge comfort to people fearful of a content moderation juggernaut. Given the information available, I am optimistic for the board’s future, but I will not hesitate to criticize it if I disagree with its decisions. So far it shows promise as an organization, and I am curious to see what’s in store for it next.