On the morning of Thursday, June 30, 2022, two large luxury buses pulled up to a grand hotel in Menlo Park, California. Milling on the driveway were the members, staffers, and trustees of the Oversight Board. Set up two years ago by Facebook, now Meta, this august gaggle exists to second-guess the company\u2019s most controversial actions. The board members, who\u2019d already logged countless hours on video calls and email, were spending their first week together in person. The buses rumbled off, whisking the 23 Zoom buddies to Meta\u2019s headquarters 4 miles away.<\/p>\n
The group made its way across the mammoth Gehry\u2013designed complex to a verdant outdoor amphitheater known as the Bowl. Sheryl Sandberg, Meta\u2019s outgoing chief operating officer, greeted the crowd in the midday heat. Next up was Nick Clegg, the company\u2019s president for global affairs. Clegg was almost startling in his effusive praise of the board. He was taking questions from the members when, suddenly, the large screens in the Bowl lit up with a familiar face.<\/p>\n
Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s expressionless visage peered down at the sweaty visitors. Though Zuckerberg had personally willed into being this body of overseers\u2014overseeing him\u2014he had never met with all its current members. Meta\u2019s founder and CEO didn\u2019t share his location, but a fair guess would have been that he was at his Hawaiian island retreat, where he had spent much of the previous year. Staring into his webcam, Zuckerberg congratulated the board on its work so far. Free expression, he said, has always been part of his company\u2019s mission\u2014but sometimes people use their voices to put others in danger. Meta shouldn\u2019t be making so many decisions on speech by itself. Zuckerberg finished his talk with a wholehearted endorsement. \u201cThis has been important to me from the beginning,\u201d he said, \u201cand I\u2019m committed to the board for the long term.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, a few weeks later, Meta announced it would give the board $150 million\u2014more than double its original commitment\u2014to keep the project going through 2025. So far, the board has received nearly 2 million appeals on content and ruled on 28 of them. It has made 119 recommendations to Meta. Its judgments have involved wampum belts, blackface, and the removal of a former US president from Facebook.<\/p>\n
Some critics see the Oversight Board as an exercise in corporate ass-covering by a bunch of Meta\u2019s puppets. If the company doesn\u2019t want to make a controversial call, it can push the board to take a position on the issue and, conveniently, take the heat. Emi Palmor, a board member who once served as the director general of Israel\u2019s Justice Ministry, says she\u2019s frequently approached in the supermarket by people seeking tech support for Meta apps. \u201cI want to murder the person who chose the name Oversight Board,\u201d she says. \u201cIt is an unexplainable term.\u201d<\/p>\n
But since it started hearing cases in the fall of 2020, the board has won grudging respect from the human rights organizations and content moderation wonks who pay attention to its work. \u201cPeople thought it would be a total fiasco,\u201d says Evelyn Douek, a Stanford law professor who follows the board closely. \u201cBut in some real ways, it has brought some accountability to Facebook.\u201d Meta, meanwhile, is declaring victory. \u201cI\u2019m absolutely delighted\u2014thrilled, thrilled, thrilled with the progress,\u201d Clegg says. The board\u2019s approach to cases \u201cis exactly what you should expect between a social media platform and an independent oversight entity.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mark Zuckerberg set up the panel to investigate how his company handles controversial posts. Now its members want to transform how social platforms work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[16],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/image-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":484,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482\/revisions\/484"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}