Facebook Pledges $130 Million to Fund 'Supreme Court' for Content--2nd Update
December 12 2019 - 12:35PM
Dow Jones News
By Jeff Horwitz
Facebook Inc. will pay $130 million to establish an independent
board charged with reviewing how the company moderates its content,
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.
"They're putting their money where their mouth is," said Kate
Klonick, an assistant law professor at St. John's University who
Facebook allowed to attend some of the internal discussions
surrounding the board. "It's a lot of money, it's a long time, and
it can't disappear."
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. While
Facebook will select the first 11 members of the board, the eleven
will choose the remaining board members, with terms lasting three
years.
The review board has been in the works since last year, when
Facebook Chief Executive 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.
Alongside news of the board's funding and timing, Facebook also
released a 60-page report it commissioned from social
responsibility consultant BSR. The document, which Facebook said it
hoped would influence the board's future actions, is an apparent
victory for a coalition of human rights organizations that lobbied
Facebook during the process of the board's creation.
The paper recommended that the board consider a wide range of
possible harms from content "beyond just freedom of expression" and
said the board should justify all of its decisions in terms of
United Nations human rights principles. It also says Facebook
should provide financial compensation to people harmed by content
"in cases when damage can be economically assessed."
"We feel a responsibility and have received feedback that the
board should be grounded in human rights principles, including the
rights to freedom of expression, privacy and remedy," said Brent
Harris, a director of governance at Facebook.
"That they even sought out this report means it's one of the
founding documents the board can go back to," said Ms. Klonick of
Facebook. "I think the civil society groups have the opportunity to
have a leg up more than they have before."
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 12, 2019 12:20 ET (17:20 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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