In the internet age, billions of people now use social media to share their thoughts and feelings, high-profile figures and political extremists among them. Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world, has been plagued with incidents of hate speech, incitement of violence, and dangerous misinformation. To combat these issues, Facebook created the Oversight Board.
“The purpose of the board is to promote free expression by making principled, independent decisions regarding content on Facebook and Instagram and by issuing recommendations on the relevant Facebook company content policy,” read Facebook’s statement on the Board.
When operating at full capacity, the Board is intended to have 40 members. Presently, it has only 19. Although operating at less than half capacity, the Board still has many heavy-weight intellectuals among its ranks. Members include Tawakkol Karman, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate; Jamal Greene, a professor at Columbia Law School; Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former Prime Minister of Denmark; and John Samples, the Vice President of the Cato Institute.
The concept for Facebook’s Oversight Board was first imagined in 2018 when Facebook thought to create an independent body to help the company make tough decisions regarding the content on the platform.
In January of 2019, the company further developed the concept by releasing a draft charter for the Board and soliciting feedback for its proposal.
The Oversight Board’s first decisions came in October of 2020, with the first case opinion issued in January 2021. The first case examined Facebook’s removal of a post featuring tweets from the former Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, in which the former Prime Minister called for the massacre of French people.
While the Oversight Board has only released decisions on seven cases, the body has already determined that Facebook was wrong in four instances to remove posts from its platform.
The Oversight Board has a specific appeals process that users must go through to get their accounts or posts reinstated.
The group’s website outlines four criteria for eligibility to submit an appeal:
- The appeals must come from an eligible account, meaning the account cannot be disabled or deleted.
- Facebook must have already undertaken an initial review process in which either Facebook or its subsidiary Instagram would have issued a final decision on the post.
- The initial content decision must be eligible for an appeal based on country-specific laws for content moderation, and eligibility will be indicated by an ID number that can be used to submit the appeal.
- The appeal to the Oversight Board must happen within 15 days of Facebook or Instagram’s final decision on the initial appeal.
One of the most meaningful looks into Facebook’s Oversight Board comes from Kate Klonick’s new article for The New Yorker called “Inside the Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court.” Klonick provides a cautiously optimistic stance on the way the Board can be used in the future.
The journey that lies ahead of the Oversight Board is not going to be an easy one. The Board will soon debate whether Facebook should restore former-President Donald Trump’s account following its deactivation because of the Capitol riot.
