By Corynne McSherry and Kit Walsh
Facebook took big step forward this week in its march to create an “oversight board” to help vet its more controversial takedown decisions, publishing more details about how it will work. Both Facebook and its users will be able to refer cases to the Board to request its review. Is this big step a big deal for online speech?
Maybe not, but it’s worth paying attention. A handful of tech companies govern a vast amount of speech online, including the platforms we use to get our news, form social bonds, and share our perspectives. That governance means, in practice, making choices about what users can say, to whom. Too often—on their own or under pressure—the speech police make bad choices, frequently at the expense of people who already struggle to make their voices heard and who are underrepresented in the leadership of these companies.
EFF has proposed a few ways to improve the way speech is governed online, ever-vigilant to the fact that your freedoms can be threatened by governments, corporations, or by other private actors like online mobs. We must ensure that any proposed solution to one of those threats does not make the others even worse.
We have six areas of concern when it comes to this kind of social media council, which we laid out earlier this year in response to a broader proposal spearheaded largely by our friends at Article 19. How does Facebook’s version stack up?
In short, Facebook’s proposal could improve the status quo. The transparency of the Board’s decisions means that we will likely know more than ever about how Facebook is making decisions. It remains to be seen, though, whether Facebook can be consistent in its application of the rules going forward, as well as how “Independent” the Oversight Board can be, and many of the important details about who will make up the Board and whether it will take the necessary steps to understand local and subcultural norms. We and other advocates will continue to press Facebook to improve the transparency and consistency of its procedures for policing speech on its platform, as well as the substance of its rules. We hope the Oversight Board will be a mechanism to support those reforms and push Facebook towards better respect for human rights.
What it won’t do, however, is fix the real underlying problem: Content moderation is extremely difficult to get right, and at the scale at which Facebook is operating, it may be impossible for one set of rules to properly govern the many communities that rely on the platform. As with any system of censorship, mistakes are inevitable. And although the ability to appeal is an important measure of harm reduction, it’s not an adequate remedy for having fair policies in place and adhering to them in the first place.
Corynne McSherry is the Legal Director at EFF, specializing in intellectual property, open access, and free speech issues. Her favorite cases involve defending online fair use, political expression, and the public domain against the assault of copyright maximalists.
Kit is a senior staff attorney at EFF, working on free speech, net neutrality, copyright, coders’ rights, and other issues that relate to freedom of expression and access to knowledge. She has worked for years to support the rights of political protesters, journalists, remix artists, and technologists to agitate for social change and to express themselves through their stories and ideas.
This article was sourced from EFF.org
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