Facebook's own court

A big step for standards of content governance

Facebook (FB) has named the first 20 members of its Oversight Board, which is being informally referred to as the FB Supreme Court. This is a first-of-its-kind attempt to introduce standards of content governance by a social network. The board will eventually consist of 40 eminent persons drawn from all global regions. It will have the final say on FB content. It will, therefore, also refine and interpret FB’s “Community Standards”, which often lead to controversial removals or retentions. According to FB, the 20-person board contains one Nobel Peace Prize winner (Tawakkol Karman, of Yemen, an Arab Spring activist), and multiple persons of eminence from across the political spectrum. One of the Indian representatives is Sudhir Krishnaswamy, who is vice-chancellor of the National Law School, Bengaluru.

While there is a preponderance of lawyers, many professions are represented. The board includes persons who have lived in at least 27 countries and speak at least 29 languages. It is being constituted as a separate limited liability company with elaborate safeguards to ensure it retains its independence, and maintains a social distance from FB. It has guaranteed financial support (including contractual payments to members) for the next six years, with FB setting up a trust with an initial corpus of $130 million for this purpose. It will start operating soon. FB users who are unhappy with their content being removed may appeal directly to the board, while FB’s content moderation team will also refer difficult cases to it. The board will debate the cases it considers significant and it may overrule FB’s moderation policy and ask for content that has been removed to be reinstated. It will publish its debates and judgements in multiple languages. It will also publish an annual report where it details evolving policies and cases handled. FB on its part agrees to abide by the judgements.

Apart from FB itself, the oversight board will also look at content on its subsidiary Instagram. However, it will not review WhatsApp due to the end-to-end encryption feature of the messaging app. It may also review FB’s advertising policy. This has already led to much controversy. FB fact-checks and removes fake news from normal posts, but it allows fake news to be deployed in paid advertising, especially in political advertising. This could have a potentially big impact on the business model and the manner in which FB is used by politicians of all hues. In an average quarter, FB faces appeals of over 3 million or more items of content, which have been removed. The network tends to reinstate a large proportion of the content removed — some is reinstated even without appeal. The articulated “Community Standards” amount to a blunt instrument, which cannot be easily or consistently applied across a multi-billion-user network that spans most of the world. As a result, the internal content moderation system is hit-and-miss. The network uses a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and human moderation. AI algorithms often remove content that human moderators reinstate. 

In addition, every nation has differences in terms of freedom of expression and locally sensitive topics. At the same time, there are also universal, or near-universal standards of what is not acceptable, such as child pornography, hate speech and calls to commit violence. By selecting members from across the world and across the political spectrum, the network is therefore trying to evolve content moderation standards that are universally acceptable. While the board will not interfere with government takedown requests, it could handle geo-censorship problems where content is left visible in one nation but not another. Codifying diverse “moral” and legal standards for content moderation is very difficult. Presumably FB is hoping the board’s judgements will lead to better content moderation policies and less in the way of glitches in moderation. If it works, this new concept of an oversight board could be a high-powered solution to a problem faced by everysocial media platform.