Inside Facebook's global constitutional convention
Inside Facebook's global constitutional convention
Navneet Alang May 12, 2019
Everybody gets criticized — especially in the social
media era. Faced with that flood of negativity, it can be hard to figure out
what to listen to, and most of us default to listening to friends or people who
know what they're talking about.
But if friendly, informed criticism is the best sort,
then it must have been profoundly uncomfortable in the Facebook offices
recently. In a New York Times op-ed this week, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes
called for the breakup of the company he helped start, claiming that the
company has simply become too big and too powerful and too slow to react to the
numerous issues of privacy, misinformation, and extremism on the platform.
Facebook wasn't happy about it (it claimed breaking up a
successful company is the wrong approach) but also knows it has a lot work to
do. Late last year, Mark Zuckerberg announced he intended to create a Facebook
Oversight Board, a quasi-independent board of non-Facebook employees whose job
it would be help with content moderation decisions. Facebook is also looking
for feedback on board, partly through some roundtables held around the world
with policy experts, one of which I attended this week in Ottawa, Canada.
Though it occurred before the publishing of Hughes' op-ed, it was clear that
Facebook is looking to preempt the kind of aggressive government intervention
proposed.
What was also clear during the four hour session,
however, was just how complicated the issue of moderating what people can post
on Facebook is. It's also seems that the company is serious about the effort.
Yet, despite what appears to be a sincere desire on the part of the company to
make itself better, more accountable, and more transparent, it was difficult
not to wonder if what Hughes and others are calling for isn't in fact correct —
that even if and when Facebook gets better at being responsible, it still isn't
is too big.
The roundtable was attended by Peter Stern, Manager of the
Policy Group, and Kevin Chan, who is the Head of Public Policy at Facebook
Canada. It took place under guidelines called “Chatham House Rules” which allow
discussion of what was said of the group but forbid attributing what was said
by whom. Around 25 policy experts attended from a variety of fields, from media
literacy and the academy, to anti-hate advocacy groups and representatives from
government.
The oversight board is ostensibly aimed at adjudicating
content removal decisions — that is, when and why a piece of content gets
removed, whether due to issues of hate speech, nudity, credible threats of
violence and so on. It is in essence a bit like a supreme court for Facebook, a
final step for significant or controversial decisions that extend beyond or
challenge normal policy. Composed of 40 people drawn from a diverse background
in both identity and area expertise, the decisions it makes will be binding and
are meant to make Facebook more accountable.
In that sense, the proposed board is a step forward.
Facebook's Peter Stern made it clear that the company was all in on the idea,
and that the desire for the board also comes from a recognition that Facebook
should not be making decisions alone. With a footprint of over 2 billion users,
the platform accounts for an enormous percentage of speech online, and thus
some sort of accountability that extends beyond, say, responsibility to
shareholders seems a welcome change.
The scope of Facebook's purview is itself mind-boggling,
with billions of pieces of content going up each day, and is also why the
process of policing content is so complicated. But it's not just the sheer
scale of things. With a global footprint, Facebook walks a fine line. On the
one hand, it helps promote certain near-universal ideals like free speech, a
boon in places under authoritarian rule. At the same time, it also needs to
respect the massive variety of both legal and social differences across the
globe. How, for example, can you come up with a rule for nudity when what is
acceptable differs so much depending on where you are?
Its desire, then, to seek input from both experts and the
public around the world seems well-intentioned, and it was clear that Facebook
is grappling not just with the obvious questions — what are good rules, how do
we apply them and so on — but also of issues over whether historically
disadvantaged groups deserve special protection, or the sticky areas of how to
separate satire and irony from hate speech.
All that said, serious concerns remain. For example, how
might a 40 person board adequately represent the concerns of the thousands of
groups across the globe? How might a set of “universal” rules address the
significant disparities in belief and practice by the billions of people who
use or will soon use the platform? How might a company firmly committed to
American ideals not end up exporting those ideals, or enforcing such social
values over and against smaller states? It's a dizzying miasma of problems for
which solutions are not merely difficult to find, but perhaps impossible.
That difficulty seems inherent to what Facebook is
actually doing: in essence, writing a constitution for the global moderation of
speech. That it is doing so at all is a recognition of what is at stake on its
platform. Yet, sitting and listening to Facebook dutifully receive and
genuinely listen to feedback, the absurdity of the situation was also hard to
ignore. Here was a private company with historically unprecedented reach trying
its best to do the right thing, in which the “right thing” was to find the
right way to govern speech on the world's largest democratic platform. It is
indicative of the fact that the company is a kind of supra-state unto itself,
significantly more powerful than most countries across the globe, and with enormous
influence.
Faced with the utter strangeness of that fact, it is hard
not to wonder if Chris Hughes et al are not on the right path — not just that
Facebook needs to be broken up, but that its sheer size is itself the root of
many problems. We are caught in a complex binary in which, on one hand, the Web
and companies like Facebook play an important role in democratic and liberal
processes around the world, but in which such companies also appear to have far
too much power and too little accountability.
During the process of the roundtable, there was reason
for both hope and despair. But one thing was clear: the proposed oversight
board would be funded by Facebook, and work to better serve its own stated
values, whether those are fairness and transparency — or, perhaps less
generously, a desire to stave off punitive regulation. It is the bind we find
ourselves in when private companies come to form core parts of public life:
they have their interests, and we have ours, and in far too many ways, those
are simply not the same thing. Facebook appears to be trying its best to
respond sincerely to criticism — and alas, that simply may not be enough.
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