INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Facebook doesn&t want to be the arbiter of decency when it comes to content policy decisions, similar to how it looked to third-party fact
checkers rather than becoming an arbiter of truth
Today on a press call with journalists, Mark Zuckerberg announced that a new external oversight committee would be created in 2019 to handle
some of Facebook content policy decisions
The body will take appeals and make final decisions
The hope is that beyond the influence of Facebook business imperatives or the public skepticism about the company internal choices, the
oversight body can come to the proper conclusions about how to handle false information, calls to violence, hate speech, harassment, and
other problems that flow through Facebook user generate content network.
&I believe the world is better off when more people have a voice to
at the same time we have a responsibility to keep people safe& Zuckerberg said
&When you connect 2 billion people, you&re going to see all the good and bad of humanity
Different cultures have different norms, not only about what content is okay, but also about who should be making those decisions in the
first place.&He cites how use of a racial slur could be hate speech or condemning hate speech as the kind of decision Facebook could use
help with.
Zuckerberg explained that over the past year he come to believe that so much power over free expression should not be
concentrated solely in Facebook hands
That echoes his sentiment from an interview with Ezra Klein earlier this year when he suggested Facebook may need a &supreme court& to
decide on controversial issues
Zuckerberg says he sees Facebook role as more akin to how a government is expected to reduce crime but not necessarily eliminate it entirely
&Our goal is to err on the side of giving people a voice while preventing real world harm& he writes
&These are not problems you fix, but issues where you continually improve.&
How The Independent Appeals Body Will Work
Zuckerberg describes
that when someone initially reports content, Facebook systems will do the first level of review
If a person wants an appeal, Facebook will also handle this second level of review and scale up its systems to handle a lot of cases
Then he says &The basic approach is going to be if you&re not happy after getting your appeal answered, you can tryto appeal to this broader
It probably not going to review every case like some of the higher courts
it might be able to choose which cases it thinks are incredibly important to look at
It will certainly need to be transparent about how it making those decisions.
Zuckerberg said Facebook will be working to get the oversight
body up and running over the next year
For now, there are plenty of unanswered questions about who will be on the committee, which of the many appeals it will review, and what
ensures it truly independent from Facebook power
&One of the biggest questions we need to figure out in the next year ishow to do the selection process for this body so that it independent
while giving people a voice
and keeping people safe.If the group ends up too tightly decided by Facebook it won&t feel like it independent enough.& Facebook plans to
query experts and start running pilots of the next year to determine what approaches to codify.
Facebook launched an internal appeals
system this year that let users request a second review when their content is taken now, and Facebook plans to expand that to allow people
to appeal responses when they report other people content
But the new independent body will serve as the final level of escalation for appeals
[Update: Since we published this report, Zuckerberg has
released a 5000-word letter describing his thoughts on Facebook policy, and the oversight body
You can read it below:]
Posted by Mark Zuckerberg onThursday, November 15, 2018
Here the passage about the oversight committee:
In
the next year, we&re planning to create a new way for people to appeal content decisions to an independent body, whose decisions would be
The purpose of this body would be to uphold the principle of giving people a voice while also recognizing the reality of keeping people
safe.
I believe independence is important for a few reasons
First, it will prevent the concentration of too much decision-making within our teams
Second, it will create accountability and oversight
Third, it will provide assurance that these decisions are made in the best interests of our community and not for commercial reasons.
This
is an incredibly important undertaking — and we&re still in the early stages of defining how this will work in practice
Starting today, we&re beginning a consultation period to address the hardest questions, such as: how are members of the body selected How do
we ensure their independence from Facebook, but also their commitment to the principles they must uphold How do people petition this body
How does the body pick which cases to hear from potentially millions of requests As part of this consultation period, we will begin piloting
these ideas in different regions of the world in the first half of 2019, with the aim of establishing this independent body by the end of
the year.
Over time, I believe this body will play an important role in our overall governance
Just as our board of directors is accountable to our shareholders, this body would be focused only on our community
Both are important, and I believe will help us serve everyone better over the long term.
Avoiding Or Acknowledging The Weight Of Its
