Meta’s independent Oversight Board has published a new report to mark its five-year anniversary, which digs into the various cases it’s been able to help Meta’s team, and Meta users, deal with, and how it’s also helped the company shape moderation policy, based on objective assessment, as opposed to internal directives.
Meta’s Oversight Board was implemented largely as an experiment in showing how external oversight can assist in policy decisions, taking the power out of the hands of a small group of Meta execs and ensuring broader insight and consideration of the impacts of its process, based on expert, third-party input.
And it’s been successful, with the Oversight Board prompting significant shifts in Meta’s policy approaches.
As per the report:
“Five years on, the Board has made important strides for Meta’s global users, bringing transparency, reasoning and a human rights perspective to decisions that were long made behind closed doors, and with little or no public-facing rationale. The model we have built brings experts from around the globe to independently review sensitive content decisions on Meta platforms with input from the public and civil society. Our Board Members are politically, ideologically, geographically, culturally and professionally diverse. This means we can take better account of the varied contexts affecting speech and other human rights in different parts of the world.”
As per the above summary, Meta has implemented 75% of the more than 300 recommendations that the Oversight Board has issued, underlining the value of the process for providing additional checks and assurance in the process.
Though there is a question, of course, over just how independent a board appointed by Meta to assess its own decisions can be, but the board has seemingly been able to operate largely in isolation from Meta’s governance, despite being funded by the company.
And again, the Oversight Board was always designed to be an experiment.
Following various moderation controversies, Meta had actually called for external governance to rule on such issues, with elected leaders to establish more definitive rules around what is and is not allowed on social platforms. That would lessen the burden on each platform to come up with its own rules, which will always be guided, at least to some degree, by the leanings of its leadership.
The Oversight Board was designed to be an example of how this could work, with global governments to ideally then collaborate on their own oversight commission, which would oversee all social platforms, and eliminate questions of bias and corporate favoritism in such rulings.
Thus far, no such body has been formed, while governments around the world continue to press social platforms to censor information based on their own logic. This is not the optimal approach to such, but then again, with so many conflicting ideas around how moderation should work, and how much government input there should be in such process, the chances of there being a consensus approach to such oversight are also very low.
But Meta’s Oversight Board shows that it can be done, and that it can have impact on critical policy, across platforms that reach and influence billions of people. And with more leaders seeking to control and influence media narratives, it seems that we need external oversight like this more than ever, yet again, we’re no closer to reaching consensus that would enable the establishment of a global social media oversight group.
Which means that the platforms will continue to go it alone, and make calls based on what they see as best, and the relative bottom-line impacts.
Which seems like a less functional, workable process. And with AI content now also muddying the waters, things are only going to get more confusing on this front.
Centralized governance, as the Oversight Board shows, can help. Yet, broad agreement seems impossible to achieve.
You can read the full summary report of the Oversight Board’s impact here.
