The Oversight Board is supposed to check the imperial power of Mark Zuckerberg
Credit: Telegraph
First proposed by Mr Zuckerberg in 2018, the Board is legally separate from Facebook and is intended as an independent check on the company’s quasi-governmental powers of censorship over the billions of people who use its services.
Its roster of 40 judges, of which 20 have already been selected, includes influential figures such as former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, conservative US judge Michael McConnell, former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, and Columbia University law professor Jamal Greene.
Users will be able to petition the Board after exhausting Facebook’s existing appeals process, with a decision to be reached within 90 days. "Expedited" cases involving serious or urgent harm will be decided more quickly.
Facebook has committed to honour the Board’s decisions, as well as attempting to follow its precedents in future. The Board will sometimes recommend changes to Facebook’s rules, though the company is not bound to follow those.
Appeals will initially be available to a subset of users across various countries before being rolled out to everyone.
Ms Thorning-Schmidt also confirmed that the Board will examine Facebook’s decisions to refer news articles to its fact-checking programme, which involves algorithmically burying news stories that are rated false by outside journalists.
Facebook Oversight Board Members
That system caused a political scandal in the US after it was applied to a negative news story about Joe Biden published by the New York Post, a long-established conservative tabloid.
Ms Thorning-Schmidt said: "We envisage that there will be such cases referred to the Board, since this is one of the big issues of the time… it’s no understatement that disinformation is of great concern to the Board."
Questions remain as to how effective the new system will be. Facebook’s acceptance of appeals has dropped drastically during the pandemic due to a shortage of moderators, and users must appeal to the Board within 15 days.
By initially only hearing cases where content has been removed, rather than left up, the body will also be handicapped during the critical period following the US election, when Facebook expects an extended vote count and disputed results that could lead to civil unrest.
British and American conservatives have also accused the Board of left-wing bias, citing especially the role of Mr Rusbridger and Ms Thorning-Schmidt, who led her country’s Social Democrats party and is married to the British Labour MP Stephen Kinnock.
Mark Zuckerberg had originally promised that the Board would be up and running by the end of 2019, meaning it could have faced the election campaign with months of precedent and experience.
Separately, Mr Zuckerberg and his opposite number at Twitter, Jack Dorsey, were formally summoned on Wednesday to testify before a committee of the US Congress about their treatment of the New York Post.
Facebook limited the spread of the story pending a fact-check, while Twitter blocked users from sharing it on the grounds that it contained "hacked materials", before later reversing its decision.
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