Facebook Oversight Board

The Oversight Board must grapple with algorithmic decision-making and whether politicians' speech ought to be governed by special rules, with implications for political speech…

The company’s inability to enact a clear, consistent, transparent content-moderation policy may lead the board to overturn the decision to bar Trump.

De-platforming is a window on the unequally distributed power and embedded assumptions that determine what content gets to stay online.

On human rights, infrastructure, and transparency, modest but welcome signals from a board that will have such a pivotal role in public discourse.

The panel might be ready to start work in October, and it is not too late for it to weigh in on this. The global information environment demands it.

The current membership is insufficiently representative, particularly of Southeast Asia, and overwhelmingly American for a body that purports to be global and independent of Facebook.…

That depends on how it will weigh Facebook’s community standards and values against global norms in its content-moderation decisions.

This board, for content moderation, may be part of the answer to problems of online speech and censorship. But U.N. Special Rapporteur David Kaye explains that it is only one part.

It's not a "Supreme Court," as Mark Zuckerberg suggested, but it might be the most interesting development in social media self-regulation in a decade.