FACEBOOK’S DISTRACTION?
Critics say oversight board deflects from the real issues
Facebook’s oversight board, which last week upheld the company’s ban of former President Donald Trump, also had some harsh words for the company. Calling Facebook’s indefinite ban of Trump a “vague, standardless penalty,” the board accused Facebook — its corporate sponsor — of seeking to “avoid its responsibilities” by asking its quasi-independent oversight group to resolve the issue.
But critics aren’t convinced that the board’s decision represents a triumph of independence or accountability. Many, in fact, see its narrow focus on one-off content issues as a distraction from deeper problems such as Facebook’s massive power, its shadowy algorithms that can amplify hate and misinformation, and more serious and complicated questions about government regulation.
“It’s much easier to talk about Donald Trump” than about Facebook’s business, said Color Of Change President Rashad Robinson, a longtime critic of Facebook. “They want to keep us in conversation about this piece of content or that piece of content, that this is about freedom of speech rather than about algorithms amplifying certain types of content, which has nothing to do with freedom of speech.”
The board, Robinson said, “is a ruse to stave off regulatory action.”
Coming after months of deliberation and nearly 10,000 public comments on the matter, the board’s decision on Trump told Facebook to specify how long the suspension of his account would last, saying that its “indefinite” ban on Trump was unreasonable. The ruling, which gives Facebook six months to comply, effectively postpones any possible Trump reinstatement and puts the onus for that decision squarely back on the company.
“They made the right choice,” said Yael Eisenstat, a former CIA officer who worked for six months in 2018 as Facebook’s global head for election-integrity operations for political advertising and is now a researcher at Betalab.
But the focus on the oversightboard process, she said, gives Facebook exactly what it wants. “We’re diverting our time, attention and energy away from the more important discussion about how to hold the company accountable for their own tools, designs and business decisions that helped spread dangerous conspiracy theories,” she said.
Facebook said it has publicly made clear that the oversight board is not a replacement for regulation.
“We established the independent Oversight Board to apply accountability and scrutiny of our actions,” the company said in a statement.
One major source of concern among Facebook critics: The oversight board reported that the company refused to answer detailed questions about how its technical features and advertising-based business model might also amplify extremism. The watchdog group Public Citizen said it was troubling that Facebook declined, for instance, to say how its news feed affected the visibility of Trump’s posts.
“Not everybody sees what any individual posts, so the algorithms decide who sees it, how they see it, when they see it and Facebook presumably has all kinds of information about the engagement levels,” said Robert Weissman, the group’s president. “The company owes us all a post mortem on the way Facebook is used and operated — did it amplify what Trump was saying and contribute to the insurrection.”
The company funds the board through an “independent trust.” Its 20 members, which will eventually grow to 40, include a former prime minister of Denmark, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian newspaper, plus legal scholars, human rights experts and journalists. The first four board members were directly chosen by Facebook. Those four then worked with Facebook to select additional members.
Facebook’s most prominent critics are notably missing from the roster.
“These are very smart and capable people who put themselves on this board,” Robinson said. But, he said, “the oversight board is a bunch of [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg consultants. He hired them, he paid for them and he can get rid of them if he wants to.”