COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 19/09/2019
Mathew Ingram
A year and a half ago, Mark Zuckerberg floated what seemed like a crazy idea. In an interview with Ezra Klein of Vox Media, the Facebook CEO said he was thinking about creating a kind of Supreme Court for the social network—an independent body that would adjudicate some of the hard decisions about what kinds of content should or shouldn’t be allowed on the site’s pages, decisions Facebook routinely gets criticized for. Imagine, Zuckerberg said, “some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech.” It wasn’t just a pipe dream or an offhand comment: for better or worse, Facebook has been hard at work over the past year creating just such an animal, which it is now calling an “Oversight Board.” This week, it took another in a series of steps towards that goal, by publishing the charter that will govern the board’s actions, as well as a document that shows how it incorporated feedback from experts and interested parties around the world, and a description of how the governance process will work.