Hi, everyone. October doesn’t have its usual verve when the fall entertainment season consists not of plays and concerts, but horror films on Netflix and even scarier presidential debates.
The Facebook Oversight Board, not to be confused with the “Real Facebook Oversight Board” (more on that later), is opening for business this month. It’s been almost three years since Mark Zuckerberg got an email from Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman proposing a Supreme Court for Facebook. Soon, the company was setting up what would become—after a long period of preparation, consultation, rule making, tool construction, lawyering, and hiring—the body that will finally meet sometime in mid- or late October. The board consists of 20 people who will give users a chance to overrule Facebook’s decisions, starting with ones where the platform removed content and reaffirmed upon appeal that the posts violated policy. (Later the board will also deal with decisions not to take down content despite complaints). Its decisions are binding. But Facebook is free to ignore the board’s recommendations on policy that might follow from its rulings.
The board’s appearance doesn’t come just in time—it’s past time, too late to impact Facebook’s practices in the 2020 election. Facebook isn’t releasing the tools that allow users to appeal decisions to the board until the body is formally operating, so at the moment, there’s not a single case waiting to be adjudicated. It will probably be towards the end of the year before the first ruling comes.
In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg wrote the code for Facebook in just over a week. The billion-dollar-plus purchases of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus each took place over a few weekends. So why has it taken so long to launch something that basically duplicates the appeals process that Facebook has been running for years?
Facebook’s answer: “We took the responsibility for building it incredibly seriously, and opened up a global consultation process to inform the board’s design … That consultation process takes time, and it’s important we get it right, since we hope the board will be a long-lasting institution.”
One key factor, says Facebook, was the care it took to assure the privacy of users appealing their cases to the board. Here’s an example of those lengths: Initially there will be no way for the board to directly contact those whose cases it is considering. Not even if the board agrees and files a report! The thousands of users who appeal will have to keep checking the board’s website and see if their confidential case number is one of the lucky few under consideration. Then, like eager drama students checking the bulletin board to see if they’ve been cast for the semester’s big musical, appellants must check the website again to see if the ruling was favorable. (The board says that it hopes to obtain the ability to contact users in the next few months.)
How ironic. Facebook’s history is littered with products that it rushed out without considering consequences or abuses. The one product where Facebook determinedly did not move fast, but painstakingly game-planned every possible alternative, is the Oversight Board—the one where the user can get the last word over Facebook.
The stalled rollout has had its own weird consequence. The long lead time apparently created an opening for a guerilla alternative to the project—a collection of Facebook foes calling themselves the Real Facebook Oversight Board. Facebook’s long-promised solution, they claim, is “a corporate whitewashing exercise.” (I’m quoting from an explanation the group privately circulated last month.) This alt-board is sort of a murderer’s row of Facebook’s most persistent critics, including Cambridge Analytica scoopster Carole Cadwalladr; Facebook-investor-turned-Cassandra Roger McNamee; the author of the 700-page bible of surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff; Color of Change president Rashad Robinson; and the inspirational Philippine journalist Maria Ressa. At a press conference this week, the Real Board unveiled a series of demands, which they will elaborate upon in a series of weekly “emergency summits.”
The individual work and voices of some of the Real Oversight Board members have made an impact inside and outside Facebook. But those critiques might not land as hard in Menlo Park when delivered as raised-fist demands from a group of professed hostiles. Facebook seemed to confirm that to me in a statement: “While we welcome views from a broad range of stakeholders, this is a stunt driven by our longtime critics.” Still, if this group can draw attention to underreported missteps by Facebook, more power to them. Personally, I’m more interested to see if the really real Oversight Board gets radical enough to make substantial policy suggestions that shame Facebook into making deep changes
In the meantime, Facebook’s oversight isn’t limited to authorized or self-appointed boards. It comes from journalists, who consistently publish articles revealing the company’s shortcomings. It comes from researchers, who document systematic failures to suppress misinformation. It comes from those enforcing existing law—including antitrust, which may be used to curtail or even roll back Facebook’s acquisitions. It comes from future legislation, which may pass privacy protections that force changes in the way Facebook collects, aggregates, and uses the personal information of its users. It comes from its employees, who are increasingly bolder in expressing displeasure at how Facebook’s policies are empowering hate, authoritarianism, and misinformation. And it comes from users, who have the power to limit their time on the platform, or delete it outright.
Maybe one day all that oversight will lead Mark Zuckerberg to make the fundamental changes in Facebook that will satisfy his critics. It just hasn’t happened so far.
In early 2018, while interviewing Mark Zuckerberg for my book, he spoke about what would become the Facebook Oversight Board. Here’s an excerpt of what he said to me, cleaned up a little for clarity, in that exchange:
"I would like to eventually have it so that you could appeal those decisions to an independent group, almost like a supreme court, if you will, that has binding authority to make those decisions. We need to figure out the mechanism for appointment … They don't report to me, right? They're not likely going to be Facebook employees. So that's a part of the process that would help make people feel like the process was more impartial on judging what content should be on the service and what’s not. I need to understand more about this. And I've spent some time this year not just talking about the specific issues that we have, whether they're around election interference or misinformation, but also around constitutional governance and different governance systems. And I hope that by the end of this year or maybe some time next year we can start to introduce some of those principles as well."
BT writes, “In reference to your recent article, one thing stood out: the personification of the internet. Is the internet its own entity? Is it biased? Is it racist? Is it conscious? Or is it simply an artificial extension of humanity programmed and sometimes dictated to act a certain way?”
Interesting question, BT. My late friend John Perry Barlow referred to the internet—cyberspace, in his terminology—as “a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.” He believed that it was a glorious liberating ether where expression was unlimited. Cyber-utopians like Barlow believed John Gilmore’s contention that the internet treated censorship like a malfunction and routed around it. In the 1990s, no one suspected that people would be asking if the internet were inherently racist—they might have even argued the opposite. What seemed to have happened is that the internet’s ubiquity came to encompass not only all of humanity’s foibles—including its darkest side—but all too often made it possible to unleash inner demons that had previously been suppressed. That accounts for the very bad stuff that people now associate with the internet. Obviously, the idealism we had about the internet 25 years ago is now tempered. And we’ve learned that censorship and surveillance cannot easily be thwarted on the net. But I do believe that global connection is worthwhile. And without the internet, could I have ordered a T-shirt with a picture of a cheese steak and the legend “Bad Things Happen in Philadelphia” within hours after our president uttered those words on national television? No, I could not have.
You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
Burger King is lobbying for a Michelin star. Impossible? Well, they do have an Impossible Whopper.
I wrote about the Oversight Board early this year, predicting it may one day overturn Mark Zuckerberg’s policy of permitting lies in political advertising. It still might happen—for the 2022 midterms.
I interviewed Anthony Fauci again for our WIRED25 conference and got his views on a vaccine, why the infection rates are rising, and the presidential debate.
Meanwhile in Taiwan, only seven people have died of Covid. In an interview with Adam Rogers, the country’s digital minister, Audrey Tang, explained how this was accomplished.
A few weeks ago Bill Gates suggested to me that if we changed the way we paid for Covid tests, we’d get speedier results. That interview led to a congresswoman introducing a bill that can make it happen.
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