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Facebook Pledges $130 Million For Its Independent 'Content Oversight Board' (siliconvalley.com) 27

Posted by EditorDavid from the coming-in-2020 dept.
"Facebook said Thursday it will commit $130 million to support the efforts of its independent oversight board," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup -- though the group won't be in place (or its members announced) until sometime in 2020.

An anonymous reader quotes their report: In a company blog post, Brent Harris, Facebook's director of governance and global affairs, said the company has been going through the process of creating "a new organization with independent oversight over how Facebook makes decisions on content" since Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg outlined his vision for the board in November 2018. In September of this year, Facebook gave some details about how it was selecting board members, and set up a site where anyone could make a recommendation for a board member... The premise behind the board's creation is that it will be able to make final decisions regarding if content, including ads and video, should be displayed on Facebook, and will also have the power to overrule Zuckerberg on such matters.

Facebook, as a company, and users can submit cases to the board, and Facebook will be have to make public any recommendations it reaches.
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Facebook Pledges $130 Million For Its Independent 'Content Oversight Board' More

Facebook Pledges $130 Million For Its Independent 'Content Oversight Board'

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  • is this the same selection process that brought us the "independent" libra cryptocurrency?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      And the same Facebook that said it is ok with politicians lying to people in adverts. I wouldn't trust them an inch after that.

  • Or "neutral", or "unbiased".

    It means: "I am trying to hide my bias and agenda extra-well, by making you believe a brain without bias or a lifeform without an agenda was possible."

    My experience tells me, it is a huge red flag thar somebody is trying to be extra-sneaky and manipulative.

    I only trust people who are open about their bias and agenda. As I can only correct for it, if I know what it is.

  • The increasingly toxic political divides that are happening across the world created this mess, and now the pressure on FB is on. Big time. Advertisers are trying hard not to be forced to take sides on this stuff, but it's got to the point now that governments, regardless of how democratic they are, have to do so because of FB's open nature. Having to invest actual capital in this sort of content filtering to keep those parties happy is going to wind up a big mess. Out in the jungle, it's survival of th

    • The increasingly toxic political divides that are happening across the world created this mess, and now the pressure on FB is on. Big time. Advertisers are trying hard not to be forced to take sides on this stuff, but it's got to the point now that governments, regardless of how democratic they are, have to do so because of FB's open nature. Having to invest actual capital in this sort of content filtering to keep those parties happy is going to wind up a big mess. Out in the jungle, it's survival of the fittest. FB already has experienced problems with various frauds against it, and now it's costing them real money and people time. $130 Mil is small potatoes compared to their last revenue statement, but everyone knows that cost escalates quickly and degrades their product as more and more people have to be used where computers fail. Sort of like a small scale intelligence agency?

      What truly baffles me is why FB and the other social media companies, back when all this talk of de-platforming :"offensive" speech and viewpoints began, is why the hell didn't they simply point to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and tell the screeching mobs and spineless advertisers "look, it's the law, we can't take sides or make judgments, under the law we must be open". If they'd only nipped this stupidity in the bud and not allowed it to gain momentum we'd be in a much healthier place as

      • A lot of the "complainers" were the ones with power to make new laws, so they were able to threaten in ways that normal people can't.

        • A lot of the "complainers" were the ones with power to make new laws, so they were able to threaten in ways that normal people can't.

          But, that's just the thing. They would do that *regardless* of how the social media companies responded. There's no such thing as "enough" when it comes to this sort of horseshit from those sorts of people, as any look through history will tell you. If they had pointed to the law instead of caving, actually behaved like an open platform and gathered public support, at least there would've been a chance for a better outcome for everyone including them.

          Strat

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        The problem is their owners are the establishment and what they wanted to do was silence all anti-establishment speech and as well as all anti-marketing speech. They want to control political discource so as to maximise their ability to ruthlessly exploit the rest of human society and with regards to marketing, they wanted to be able to tell any lie about any product without being challenged with the truth.

        So they had to work up to that level of censorship because if they tried to start with that and silly

    • I would say they are an intelligence agency, but I would not say they are small scale.
    • Facebook doesn't seem to care, they just want the problem to go away, so make an "independent" board and pray.

    • Re:Pressure is building... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Saturday December 14, 2019 @03:45PM (#59519220)
      As an advertiser, it's a no-brainer. I don't want anything to do with the right wing nutjobs. They tend to be less educated, poorer, and more violent. I don't want the gun-toting uneducated, poor people as clients. I'm going to advertise with whoever can cut these people out of the target market so that I don't have to pay to advertise to them. The quicker that Facebook and Google can assure me that my advertising money isn't wasted going to people like that, the more money I'll spend.
      • That's fine. That makes sense as a matter of advertising policy and potentially as a matter of moral policy. But I have to ask about what you left out here: do you not carry the same policy for left wing nutjobs? If not, then why? In my experience, they're just as violent as the left wing ones, though maybe more educated and not poor. I don't want to suggest you might think violence is acceptable as long as it's by educated rich people, but that's one possible reading of your omission.
  • Pledges rarely actually happen. Some billionaires "pledged" hundreds of millions of dollars to help restore the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, too. I hear the money never turned up.
  • in schools. Then we would not need to deal with socialism or this kind of stuff and other pseudo problems over and over.

    The Comics Code Authority (CCA) [wikipedia.org] was formed in 1954 by the Comics Magazine Association of America as an alternative to government regulation,

    If individuals fall for untruths maybe we did a bad job in educating them in our schools.

    When it matters I know what is really BS!

    Just my 2 cents ;)

    • That pattern happens a lot. It's how we ended up with the ESRB, RIAA ratings, BBFC, the British national internet filter, and plenty more. First government starts talking a lot about the need to impose censorship. Quite quickly the affected industry realises that, one way or another, censorship is coming - so they set up a board to do it themselves. If they can demonstrate that their industry is capable of effectively policing themselves for anything offensive - and of stamping out any company which crosses

      • the government will back down, as legislators decide it's not worth the tax money and political capital.

        On the contrary. This solution is absolutely in governments' favor. They get an organization they can control indirectly to get the censorship they want. At the same time as it's a private organization doing it, there's no legal recourse for the censored.

        That's what's happening with social media in Germany for example. We technically have free speech and A LOT of what's being labeled as "hate speech" isn't actually illegal even by our far-reaching legal standards. So our government outsourced censorship of

  • ... they become the Content Overlook Board.

  • ... Facebook will [...] have to make public ...

    HaHa: You have a sarcastic sense of humour. Facebook has a terrible track-record on transparency.

    ... to make final decisions ...

    Many bosses intensely dislike an underling telling them what they can't do: It's easy to assume a predatory business, such as Facebook, contains many such bosses. History reveals, the underlings are quickly deprived of their power to say "No".

  • Because that's what it is.

    Democrats spouting nonsense about collusion, conspiracy theorists spouting nonsense about UFOs and Epstein killing himself, and Conservatives spouting nonsense about birth certificates are all opinions.

    At least to the other side.

    This isn't a court of law where rules regarding what evidence may be presented. It's pretty simple to filter out "kill all 'insert bigoted reference here'". It's tougher to define 'fake news'.

    I think making Greta Thunberg person of the year' is fake news

  • HaHaHaHaHa. Rinse. Repeat.

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