Facebook Pledges $130 Million to Fund 'Supreme Court' for Content--Update
December 12 2019 - 12:12PM
Dow Jones News
By Jeff Horwitz
Facebook Inc. will pay $130 million to establish an independent
board charged with reviewing the company's content moderating,
providing long-term backing to its experiment in better policing
the platform.
The money, which Facebook described as an "initial commitment,"
is meant to cover six years of operations, including salaries for
board members, office space and a staff including case managers,
lawyers and human resources personnel. A corporate trust managed by
financial services firm Brown Brothers Harriman will in turn
oversee the board's budget and administration.
The money marks a significant investment in an organization that
doesn't yet exist, but could take on responsibility for some of the
company's thorniest decisions. In recent years, Facebook has been
beset by public controversies over how it handles misinformation,
hate speech and graphic content.
Similar controversies have occurred at Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube
and Twitter Inc. But Facebook is the first of the social media
giants to give an outside organization potentially binding control
over how some of them are addressed.
Sometimes dubbed "Facebook's Supreme Court," the board will
function like an appeals court, with five-person panels
adjudicating controversies arising from Facebook's in-house efforts
to enforce its content standards. In addition to rendering binding
decisions on a case-by-case basis, the board can recommend policy
changes to Facebook that the company must publicly address.
The review board has been in the works since last year, when
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that despite his optimism about
the company's role in society, "without sufficient safeguards,
people will misuse these tools to interfere in elections, spread
misinformation, and incite violence."
Before launching the board, the company held listening sessions
across the globe and produced numerous reports on its plans and
feedback. Thursday's funding announcement was paired with news of
an additional delay: Facebook says it no longer expects to appoint
board members before early next year.
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 12, 2019 11:57 ET (16:57 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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