The body has yet to convene a meeting.Ĭadwalladr’s board has embraced a broader definition of oversight than the one championed by Zuckerberg. The Facebook Oversight Board’s first twenty members, who were named in May, include Cadwalladr’s former boss at the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. Most companies are regulated by statutes and laws, whereas Facebook, with its unparalleled reach-McNamee described it to me as having “more active monthly users than there are notional Christians in the world, and twice as many as there are people living in China”-operates in a regulation-free zone. As Facebook’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in a blog post announcing the official board two years ago, “The purpose of this body would be to uphold the principle of giving people a voice while also recognizing the reality of keeping people safe.” It was a widely lauded and unprecedented move-what publicly traded company had ever ceded a degree of control to an independent body? But it was also a necessary one. The Real Facebook Oversight Board is a self-appointed proxy for the official Facebook Oversight Board, which was designed to function as a kind of independent appeals court, adjudicating various challenges to the company’s decisions on whether to remove content. “We demand comprehensive action to insure that Facebook cannot be weaponized to undermine the vote.” Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, which has been tracking hate groups for decades, observed that Facebook “actively and knowingly has facilitated the flow of poison into the population, and enabled waves of anti-Semitism and racism, Holocaust denialism and Islamophobic conspiracies, disinformation and extremism.” The Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe called his participation in the Real Facebook Oversight Board “probably the most important effort in my fifty-year career in the law.” “Our group has come together for one purpose,” Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor emerita and the author of “ The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” said on the Zoom call. Shireen Mitchell, the founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women and Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor. Other members include Maria Ressa, a Filipino journalist and leading critic of Facebook’s role in supporting President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous regime Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. “This is an emergency intervention, focussed on the American election,” she told me, a few hours before the launch. That reporting led her to the realization that “journalism alone is not enough.” Earlier this year, she started a nonprofit called All the Citizens, which is organizing the Real Facebook Oversight Board. Cadwalladr was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last year, for exposing the malpractices of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, both in the U.S. Robinson recounted the experience at the launch, over Zoom, of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an international, ad-hoc cadre of activists and academics convened by the British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. The Black community, Robinson would later say, saw the post as a “threat to our ability to express our will for a better future.” But the company, which has become a de-facto arbiter of political speech, interpreted the takedown request as a matter of semantics Robinson said that it quibbled over the meaning of “army.” The message in question showed the President’s eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr., calling upon “an army” of Trump supporters to show up at polls across the country, to “protect” the election. Two hours before Donald Trump boosted the standing of white supremacists at the last Presidential debate, Facebook told Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil-rights organization Color of Change, that it would not remove a potentially incendiary and racially tinged Trump-campaign post.
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