The control committee of Facebook, an independent body wanted by the founder Mark Zuckerberg to settle the most complex ethical issues of the social network, will begin its public works between the middle and the end of October. The committee, which in English is called the Oversight Board, has often been presented by the media as the “Supreme Court of Facebook”, that is, as an influential assembly capable of making important decisions.
But a high-profile group of Facebook critics argue that the committee is in fact an ineffective tool for solving the social network's problems and on Friday, a day after the announcement of the start of work, it made public the creation of another committee. parallel, which will be called “Real Facebook Oversight Board” and which, as the name shows, aims to directly oppose the Oversight Board, also to contest the fact that, probably, the committee will not be ready in time for the elections in the United States.
Facebook's governance committee – the original one – was proposed by Zuckerberg in 2018 and announced in 2019. The identity of its 40 members has been made public in the past few months, and there are many famous and important names. There are Helle Thorning-Schmidt, former Prime Minister of Denmark, Nobel laureate Tawakkul Karman, former Guardian Director Alan Rusbridger, former Vice-President of the European Court of Human Rights Andras Sajo, the leader of the African section of Internet Without Borders Julie Owono.
– Read also: Will Facebook be damaged by boycott of advertisers?
Initially, the committee should have had broad decision-making powers. In 2018, Zuckerberg said its members would make “definitive judgments about what kind of speech is acceptable” on the platform, but as these powers have been restricted. In the early days, in fact, the committee will only be able to accept appeals from users who believe that their posts have been unjustly removed. He will not be able to express himself, however, on the posts that are kept online by the social network, and which are the ones that usually generate the most controversy.
One of the most serious controversies this year, for example, opened in late May, when US President Donald Trump hoped in a tweet and Facebook post that protests against racism in the United States, which had also led to the looting of some shops, were stopped with firearms. He also used an old racist saying to do so. Twitter decided to delete the tweet, Facebook decided to keep the post online, generating many protests even within the company. On decisions like this the committee will not be able to express itself, but things could change over time.
Opinions on the committee are already quite strong even before the work begins. Many influential American journalists, such as New York Times columnist Kara Swisher, are critical. Swisher wrote that the committee's purpose appears to be “to stop the ocean with the hands.” Legal experts have more nuanced and in some cases positive judgments. A Yale Law Journal paper argues that the committee could set an interesting precedent for online content moderation.
Concerns towards the committee have increased with the announcement that the work will begin in the second half of October: with these timelines it is very likely, in fact, that the committee will not have time to pronounce on the American elections at the beginning of November, even if for now Facebook has not said anything about it. The American elections are likely to be hard fought, and Facebook will certainly be used to amplify propaganda and disinformation in a very delicate moment: having an independent and impartial judicial body would have been useful.
So on Friday an informal group of Facebook experts and critics decided to create the “Real Facebook Oversight Board”. This shadow committee is also made up of high-profile members, such as former President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, author of Surveillance Capitalism, Roger McNamee, former Facebook investor turned critic of ' company, Maria Ressa, Filipino journalist and dissident, and Carole Cadwalladr, Guardian journalist who wrote some of the first and most important articles on the Cambridge Analytica case.
– Read also: Trump's disastrous interview with Fox News
The first meeting of the shadow committee will be held on October 1st. Its members are very aggressive. Zuboff said in a statement that Facebook is “a steaming cauldron of lies, violence and danger that destabilizes elections and democratic systems around the world.” Cadwalladr, in an interview with NBC News, said, “This is an emergency response. We know that there will be many cases in which Facebook will be crucial, before and after the elections “.
The aim of the group, says Cadwalladr, is to “counterbalance the spin of Facebook”, and already from here we understand that the formation “Real Facebook Oversight Board” is above all a symbolic protest initiative. NBC wrote that Facebook managers were upset at the news of the creation of a shadow committee and protested against the organizers. Alan Rusbridger, on the other hand, commented by saying: “The more we are, the better”.
The shadow committee said it received funding from Luminate, a philanthropic organization backed by the Omidyar Group, which itself is the organization of Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder turned philanthropist and activist. The Omidyar Group, among other things, is the publisher of the online newspaper The Intercept.
The original committee, on the other hand, is funded directly by Facebook with 160 million dollars, which according to the social network should be enough to support its activities for at least six years.
