Facebook names 20-member Oversight Board to moderate content

Social networking giant Facebook on Wednesday announced that it has constituted a 20-member Oversight Board, which will act as a ‘Supreme Court’ on decisions about how content is moderated on its platforms Instagram and Facebook.

The Oversight Board will address the disputes regarding posts, pages, profiles, groups, as well as, advertisements on Facebook platforms. Further, it will also decide on a number of ethical, editorial, privacy, free speech and moral issues.

The Board will be the final authority to decide whether a specific content should be allowed or removed from Facebook and Instagram. It can also overturn decisions taken by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Cases can be referred to the board both by the users and Facebook, but it’ll be up to the board on which cases are to be taken. It will have its own user-facing website, which will be used for submitting disputes.

According to an official blog post by Facebook announcing the news, when Zuckerberg had first outlined his blueprint hinting at introducing a new system for content governance and enforcement, he had said, “Facebook should not make so many important decisions about free expression and safety on our own.” The blog further adds that “with our size comes a great deal of responsibility and while we have always taken advice from experts on how to best keep our platforms safe, until now, we have made the final decisions about what should be allowed on our platforms and what should be removed. And these decisions often are not easy to make – most judgments do not have obvious, or uncontroversial, outcomes and yet many of them have significant implications for free expression.”

All board members are said to be independent of Facebook or other social media companies. They cannot be removed by Facebook, and not financially dependant on the social media giant.

Zuckerberg had decided to constitute the board in early 2018, as he thought that outsourcing some decisions to an independent entity would help in enhancing the credibility of his company.

Initially, the Board will only consider the cases where the user content was removed by Facebook but later, it will also review cases where arguably objectionable content was allowed to stand.

―DNA India