Facebook’s bid to control the internet Its new Oversight Board could make it more powerful than nation states
Why should Zuckerberg get to write our online constitution? (Photo by Graeme Jennings - Pool/Getty Images)
Facebook’s content moderation team makes more than three million decisions every day about whether a post breaks its various content rules, ranging from those on nudity to hate speech. So on paper, there is nothing particularly remarkable about five such decisions last month; they concerned nudity in Brazil, Covid misinformation in France and hate speech in Russia, the US and Myanmar.
But while these are the kind of issues Facebook’s tens of thousands of moderators face on a daily basis, these five could mark the start of a new era of governance for the entire internet. They are, in effect, the first rulings of the site’s contentious new Oversight Board.
Facebook has for years been searching for a simple solution to the problems thrown up by its enormous growth; it alone has two billion users, while Instagram (which it also owns) has nearly as many. But who should be in charge of uniformly monitoring their posts?
Critics have long warned that no company — let alone one largely controlled by Mark Zuckerberg — should have that much power. At the same time, Facebook has been reluctant to let individual governments introduce onerous laws governing its operation — for the simple reason that it could leave the website with 190 or more separate legally binding rulebooks to enforce. It has claimed to be open to countries cooperating to come up with such a set of rules, but, unsurprisingly, that has not happened.
So into that gulf Facebook has created an Oversight Board, which it has endowed with $130 million for its first years of operation. Predictably the board, which is supposedly independent and has the power to reverse the company’s decisions, has faced fervent criticism from the outset. Long before it first made any of its rulings, critics set up an opposing “Real Facebook Oversight Board”, triggering a legal war of words with the social media giant over whether or not they could use that name.
The early consensus seemed clear: the Oversight Board would not be sufficiently independent, would be comprised of patsies and should be written off early. Yet the real picture seems far more complex: after all, if Facebook had wanted to set up an organisation to act as a fig leaf for accountability, it could have done so far more easily and without such an excessive price tag.
For a start, Facebook is unable to pull the funding for the Oversight Board for at least six years — meaning that it is committed to spending more than $20 million a year for that period. At that point, the Board should in theory be well established, so that if it has proven itself effective and Zuckerberg pulls the plug, that will be visible to the world’s media. Not a good look.
As for Facebook’s claims about the Board’s independence, there do seem to be legitimate concerns to be had about the company’s ability to refer cases to the Board and require it to rule on them. But for the most part, the Board members are able to select their own cases from the thousands sent their way by user appeals. It is also able to draw upon whatever human rights and expression principles it chooses to shape its decision making.
But funding and terms of reference can only get you so far. The real question is who is chosen to make up the membership of the Oversight Board. And here comes a catch — the first batch are chosen by Facebook, as they inevitably would be directly or indirectly (if someone else is going to pick the Board members, Facebook has to pick them). But future Board members will be chosen by current ones.
So has the company loaded up the Oversight Board with loyalists? The honest answer is that it doesn’t seem so. Quite a few people among the first 20 are public critics of the site, and most of the others don’t seem like its natural allies. Law professor Jamal Greene has publicly stated “there’s lots of reasons” not to trust Facebook, while professor Evelyn Aswad has published multiple papers calling on social giants to align themselves with international human rights law.
Only five of the first 20 Board members are from the USA, while ten are women. They reach across the political spectrum, though most come from a background in human rights, freedom of expression or international law. But the Board also includes former Prime Minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt, and Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian when it published Edward Snowden’s revelations on NSA surveillance and Big Tech’s complicity therein. (Disclosure: I worked for The Guardian on that project.)
More importantly, the Board’s first five rulings have hardly gone in Facebook’s favour: indeed, it ruled against the social media giant in four of them. One such ruling reinstated a French post advocating for the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. The Board didn’t find the post to be accurate — it agreed it was likely misinformation — but found it didn’t meet the site’s criteria for posing a risk of “imminent harm”. Instead it concluded the rules themselves were “inappropriately vague and inconsistent with international human rights standards”.
Certainly it’s encouraging to see the Oversight Board making a robust attempt to hold Facebook to account and force it to improve its rulebook. In time, this will no doubt create a set of rules tested and tempered by human rights experts around the world. Indeed, it’s not difficult to imagine how this could easily become the model rulebook — a constitution of sorts — for the site, and from there for the entire internet. If other tech companies see this system work out for one platform and, more importantly, reduce the criticism it receives, they will likely adopt it themselves.
And that would probably represent a real improvement to today’s reality. But make no mistake: the biggest winner here would still be Facebook. It would get, through a process that it controlled, the chance to create a rulebook based on the smallest amount of action; what would be the slimmest and cheapest way to enforce a collection of rules that would get lawmakers and activists off its back?
As a process, it’s like allowing a defendant to not only choose their judge and jury, but to also help write the criminal code before their case begins. However much you try to maintain an appearance of fairness, everyone is still going to suspect you’ve stacked the deck to help yourself.
To switch metaphors, think about which of two dictators is the cannier operator. Is it the one who pumps out blatant propaganda on television, jails serious political opponents and wins every election with 95% of the vote? Or is it the one who allows just enough dissent, lets rival political parties exist, but makes sure that come what may he’ll always get enough votes to stay in power?
At the end of the day, it’s worth remembering that Facebook makes tens of billions in profits each year — so $130 million over six years would be an extremely low-cost way of perpetuating something close to the status quo. For if this effort is successful, the benefits will be immeasurable. It would allow the company to restrict scrutiny over which content should be permissible to case-by-case examples. It would stifle discussion of how its algorithms work, and what effects they have. And more importantly, if the Oversight Board is used by Facebook to resist efforts by nation states to create their own legislation, it would be essentially elevating itself to a position higher than democratically elected governments.
Activists are understandably worried about the prospect of a toothless Facebook Oversight Board stacked with patsies. Perhaps they should be more worried about the effects of one that actually does its job.
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SubscribeI gave up Facebook on the first of Jan. 2016, knowing how irritating all my ‘friends’ would be about the EU referendum. It’s very easy to get rid of it, you have to download all your old garbage first then it can be closed down totally.
This is the only way to be free. Don’t bother getting your knickers in a twist about the power it has over others, just do what you can yourself and remove its power over you. The peace and relief when you remove social media from your life is like the peace of the Lord.
A growing number of people have left FB and more are leaving FB, day by day. My disgust with them means I am about to drop WHATSAPP. Furthermore the young regard FB as an “old foggies hangout” and about as enticing as their granddads dirty socks.
Being told, for example, “Parler is a hangout for far right extremists” cuts both ways. It causes me to leave platforms whose proselytising politics and morals I find repugnant. When the MSM, en masse, cover up for Hunter Biden’s extraordinary actions: anyone with a brain re-filters what they hear and how they understand it.
I have not done so yet but I agree Alison. First of all, there are often just whiny people on there, others bragging about something they have done, and largely a lot of hogwash content. I am at the breaking point of getting off too. Now in addition to that, they want to monitor for hate speech. I believe they want to limit people’s opinions and that is another form of control. Who really needs it anyway?
I left. It has truly evolved in a cesspool of self pity and people coming together in misery to whine or blame the world or hate on someone else.
Waste of your life to be on there, really. But so many can’t see it because they are on it 24/7.
A wise man.
The real danger of these big media companies is the closing down of Free Speech.
That one of them felt happy to close down an account of the President of the US is a very worrying example.
The only way to solve this problem is through competition, break the existing ones down into smaller companies.
Yes, that is the real problem – closing Free Speech and targeting speech around information they don’t want you to be aware of, even if it is accurate. Your example is a solid example about the President of the USA. There are also other examples such as vaccine information they don’t want circulated or anti-viral medicine that can be helpful – all deemed to be misinformation. They already control so many minds through the mainstream media so I knew it would only be a matter of time that they would tackle the social media so that they control what is told there. But there will be many that will think it is wonderful.
They can and do destroy competition through controlling server farms. Until some entity can create a viable alternative to Google, Amazon, Facebook servers, any true competitor is easily crushed.
Another route to all but make competitors invisible is to delete them from the Google and Apple app stores. For 99% of internet users they may as well not exist then. Examples are gab and Parler (until Amazon nuked it’s server space).
In the example of Parler the excuse was that it was used to organise the Washington protests – even though of the 90+ people charged so far only ~8 used Parler, and most of the rest used FaceBook/Instagram or YouTube.
And yet futures exchange groups such as HKEC, LSE, ICE and CME, all far smaller and a lot less wealthy than Facebook, manage to operate globally under exactly that constraint. They have to have proper rulebooks, they have to enforce those rules, they increasingly also have to act as proxy regulators of their customers where the local regulator is too cowardly or indolent to act effectively or at all (eg FCA), and they have to understand whether the laws of eg Botswana allow them to connect clients there.
The idea that a financial company “reluctant to let individual governments introduce onerous laws” would be allowed to get away with any such nonsense is laughable. Why are these shysters treated with such deference?
OK, so Facebook is a quasi-media company rather than a financial venue, but there are other media companies who have to observe standards. So just make them responsible in law for the balance, truthfulness and harmfulness of content, like you would a new TV broadcaster.
Close your Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts now, simps. Save yourself a lot of time. Even WhatsApp data is shared with Facebook mother ship, including your IP address and phone number which is how they pinpoint and target you. Surely you must have asked yourself the question how does WhatsApp make money as there is no advertising? Its by harvesting the data.
Yes G and I wish they would create another social media platform that isn’t doing these things but we know if it didn’t start out that way, they would end that way just like Facebook and the others mentioned. Mark Z is rich enough – if mostly all left then he would be crying in his milk.
They all go this way, it is inevitable.
Now that they know what they know about human psychology and how we respond to this stuff the people who want to make money on the downfall of humanity can do so and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
so FB created a problem in wanting to play the role of hall monitor and censor speech, and now its Frankenstein has gotten out of hand. Splendid. There were few problems back in normal times when the terms included easy to follow things about obscenity or mistreatment of children or inciting violence. No, the Ministry of Truth part had to emerge in order to dictate what is acceptable political speech, and hasn’t that gone swimmingly.
Let me get this right: there’s 20 people on the oversight board and it has a budget of 20 million quid yeah. Well I doubt anyone of that golden 20 are going to rock the boat are they…..?
It would be amusing if the Facebook Oversight Group also included Michelle Obama and she had to sit next to the former Danish PM at their meetings. Watching La Obama glower at Nelson Mandela’s funeral while her husband and the lovely Danish PM took selfies of each other was one of the funniest things I have ever seen in my life.
Its amusing that so many have been zuckered by young Mark.
Hey James, have you notIced that just about everyone you consider an ‘independent’ Board member is clearly bringing a Leftist perspective. Have you ever met a n international human rights expert (to cite one of your examples) with any other perspective. Disappointing piece of journalism.
The fastest way to get unhooked from social media these days is to just say there is no such thing as a “woman’s d**k.”
It realeases you from the matrix. Try it!
I listened to an interview between Yuval Noah Harari and Zuckerberg. Try as he might, Zuckerberg is not a real person. He has this everpresent, simmering neuroticism and anxiety that is palpable. He’s probably a Vegan.
Maybe the board should be elected by FB (?verified) members?
An occasional card or letter is sufficient (for me) to keep me updated on friend’s and family’s: cats, dogs kids, garden, work, meals, hobbies, et al. Facebook is the selfie of society.