Facebook hires lawyers, academics for oversight
So far, Facebook’s oversight board includes 20 academics, journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates. Tech giant created board after criticism of what’s seen as extensive power
Facebook Inc. introduced the initial members of its oversight board, the group that will hear user appeals on content decisions and make binding judgment calls that could go against earlier decisions by the company.
So far, the board includes 20 academics, lawyers, journalists and human rights advocates. The largest social media company created the panel after criticism of Facebook’s extensive power, which is only growing: It has about three billion users now.
“Up until now, some of the most difficult decisions have been made by Facebook and you could say Mark Zuckerberg,” Helle ThorningSchmidt, oversight board cochair and former prime minister of Denmark, said Wednesday.
Zuckerberg, Facebook’s cofounder and chief executive officer, has voting control of the company, and has called the board a check on his power — a way for Facebook to self-regulate, perhaps so governments don’t feel the need to step in.
“It’s a huge step for the global community,” Schmidt said.
She’s co-chairing with Jamal Greene of Columbia Law School, who focuses on constitutional rights, Michael McConnell, a constitutional law professor at Stanford Law
School, and Catalina BoteroMarino, dean of the Universidad de los Andes Faculty of Law in Bogota.
The co-chairs cautioned that they will only be able to review a few cases, some long after Facebook has made its initial decision.
“We’re going to be selecting a few flowers — or maybe they’re weeds — from a field of possibilities,” McConnell said. “We are not the internet police. That isn’t our job. Our job is more to consider appeals, to apply an after-the-fact deliberative second look at this, so as to advance fairness and neutrality in decision-making.”
The board will focus on cases from Facebook and Instagram that affect a large number of people or involve a particularly thorny area of Facebook’s policy, so that one decision has a higher impact. The decisions will be made public.
The board said it won’t be addressing problems on WhatsApp, since that app is encrypted so board members can’t see what users are saying to each other.