Close to a year has passed since Mark Zuckerberg introduced the idea of Facebook’s “Supreme Court”. With new details emerging, The Telegraph took time to review this concept and what it could mean for the future of the social media platform.
The article paints a vivid picture of a world where users present their qualms with the social media company to an “Oversight Board”.
Suppose that, ten years from now, you make a post on a social network. The post is removed by a moderator for violating the social network’s terms of service. You disagree and appeal the decision, escalating your case all the way to an independent tribunal which sits outside the network’s normal power structure. On the appointed day, you carefully select an appropriate outfit – serious, professional, but not finicky – and set up your webcam to make your case before the internet’s new judiciary.
While this future is a ways away, it accurately depicts the notion that Zuckerberg has alluded to in the past year. Of course, this court wouldn’t dilute Zuckerberg’s control over the company but it would change the way it is governed. Facebook would have an obligation to adhere to the decisions made by this ‘independent tribunal’ and in some cases, be overruled by it.
In November Zuckerberg and Facebook published A Blue Print for Content Governance that outlined the board’s structure. The Telegraph broke down what the board would consist of. 40 individuals would sit on the panel, none of which could hold any past affiliation with Facebook. All 40 would consist of a wide variety of experts meant to focus on the Facebook community rather than company interests.
Despite Zuckerberg quoting of “give people the power” in the first paragraph of his post, “give people a voice” is a closer depiction of the future relationship between users and the platform. The board would not make new rules based off of cases. Their purpose would be to clarify Facebook rules and suggest changes to them if necessary.
What the experts are saying
The reception by experts has been diverse, ranging between “cautiously optimistic” to varying degrees of skepticism.
Such a body is almost without precedent in the corporate world, according to Kate Klonick, a professor of law at St John’s University in New York City who has long called on Facebook to “bind itself to the mast” by adopting something like a constitution. The fact that it is now doing so represents an epochal shift in which Facebook is finally recognising its responsibilities as, in her phrase, one of Earth’s “new governors”.
Experts like professor Klonick fall in the “cautiously optimistic side, where some of Facebook’s other critics are far from the word optimistic. K. Sabeel Rahman, the president of Demos- a think tank in the US, is skeptical at best.
“Doing content moderation without interrogating those underlying structures, it’s – I’m trying to think of an appropriate anology,” he says. “Rearranging the deckchairs is the classic one.” Nevertheless, everyone in tech world “will be watching this quite closely”.
Both sides, regardless of their reservations, are piqued by the concept of an external court assessing the way tech giant’s rules are interpreted by the public. There is a lot of work to be done, and even more questions to be answered. The most pressing being, how does a court like Facebook remain impartial?
Perhaps we will see this as a common place amongst the industry in the future but for now all eyes are on Facebook’s next move.
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