11 ms·

Facebook Pledges $130M to Fund “Supreme Court” for Content

100 points by otterley 7y ago

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> A corporate trust managed by financial services firm Brown Brothers Harriman will in turn oversee the board’s budget and administration Any details on how board members will be appointed, vetted and selected? This looks like Facebook creating a red herring it can blame for the consequences of policing its platform.
- deusofnull 7y ago
  from the article, > While Facebook will select the first 11 members of the board, the eleven will choose the remaining board members, with terms lasting three years. facebook picks the first 11 board members and then those 11 staff new appointments for 3 year terms, but not sure if the first 11 also control staffing throughout the org. if this is a "facebook supreme court" then its kinda fishy if the stakeholders get to appoint the first 11 judges... edit: also, tsk tsk wallstreet journal. if you use numerals (11) in a piece of writing, dont switch to the written number (eleven)!
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > its kinda fishy if the stakeholders get to appoint the first 11 judges So it's a Facebook-controlled board. An honest mechanism would involve outside groups from the start. A legitimate mechanism probably requires the government to step in. This is simply a deflection mechanism, a board for PR. > if you use numerals (11) in a piece of writing, dont switch to the written number (eleven) This is common style advice. The numeral represents a quantity. Written out, it represents the body per se.
    - deusofnull 7y ago
      Frankly i agree about gov intervention in such matters because how can you really, honestly take a company at its word that its self-appointed accountability board is actually independent? Or has power to make decisions that would hurt Facebook. And companies shouldnt really be expected to do that, or at least we shouldnt expect that over a government solution. Something like this is exaccccctly what governments is designed to handle vs what business can be expected to do on its own.
  - rumanator 7y ago
    > While Facebook will select the first 11 members of the board, the eleven will choose the remaining board members, with terms lasting three years. So Facebook reserves its right to dictate who serves on the board, whether directly or indirectly.
yingw787 7y ago
$130M sounds like a tiny sum for content arbitration at Facebook’s scale and the number of jurisdictions it crosses. I mean, nobody’s done it before, so it will be interesting. But I don’t think this is or could be a serious attempt to solve the systemic issues at stake with the platform.
DenverR 7y ago
Why does facebook continue to allow the running of political ads and all the headache that comes with it (despite it being a minuscule piece of it's overall revenue)? Power. You can see this as being the most tone-deaf way possible to address the problem, or as a power grab to become an arbiter of truth.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  The right-wing has been claiming anti-conservative bias in big tech for a while now. Banning political ads, even if done across the board, would be likely to ramp that up dramatically. https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756734/trump-google-anti-conservative-bias-claims-tweets https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756734/trump-google-anti... For example: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/republicans-criticize-googles-new-policy-reining-in-political-ads-2019-11-26 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/republicans-criticize-goog... > President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and other Republican election groups criticized tech giant Google on Tuesday for making it harder for political advertisers to target specific types of people. The GOP groups said the changes will lead directly to suppressing voter turnout and would “disproportionately” hurt Republican candidates.
  - lightbyte 7y ago
    The right-wing makes all sorts of false claims of victim-hood constantly, who cares.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      Said right-wing currently controls the Senate, the White House, is appointing large numbers of Federal judges, etc. It's not shocking for Facebook to want to avoid worsening relations with people holding significant power to regulate them. No one really wants to be the subject of a Trump tweetstorm, either.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
riazrizvi 7y ago
Far better* than the alternative, a transparent process to decide what is acceptable content on social media that is managed by the government, you know, democratically. At least this way Facebook owns the process from the get go, it’s the purest form of ‘regulatory capture’. Just imagine if technology companies had to adhere to publishing standard like broadcasters and journalists do, because of regulations. All that money from conspiracy theory political ads targeting niche social groups would evaporate. Social media platforms would be far less political influence. *For Facebook.
- gonational 7y ago
  In the United States of America we already have something like this, it’s called the 1st Amendment in the Constitution. Since Facebook enjoys the privilege of being classified as a “public square”, they do not have the legal right to censor content at all, unless the content is illegal (threats, etc.). This is not currently being enforced. Imagine being so oppressed that your ego feels the need to down-vote this comment :(
  - riazrizvi 7y ago
    1. We also have a Federal Communication Commission which regulates to prevent information broadcasters from abusing their power. 2. > Imagine being so oppressed that your ego feels the need to down-vote this comment :( I don't have the ability to downvote replies. I notice too that your comment has not been edited, so you must have written it at the same time you originally posted before anyone could have upvoted or downvoted you. Why don't you do a quick edit, for appearances sake...
buboard 7y ago
They should name it Goskomizdat
- vnchr 7y ago
  "Ministry of Truth" has a nice ring to it [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Ministry_of_Truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_of_Nineteen_Eighty-...
jeffdavis 7y ago
What will be the equivalent to the Bill of Rights, on which this new court will base its opinions?
imgabe 7y ago
Facebook: a place to share things approved by a board of corporate trustees.
chadlavi 7y ago
No thanks!
ghostpepper 7y ago
Are we supposed to believe that the people receiving the $130M will be somehow independent and make decisions without influence from Facebook? That doesn't sound very plausible.
- ryanisnan 7y ago
  > 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. I hope what doesn't happen is that this turns into a way for Facebook to delay/confuse/distort how decisions are made, and ultimately give Facebook itself a way to shirk the blame.
  - WarDores 7y ago
    That's exactly what this is. They're trying to avoid regulation of any kind, and "third party audits" are historically a good way to keep the federal government out of your hair for at least a measurable period of time. The financial industry learned this quickly.
brosinante 7y ago
The wolves voting for free range sheep.
jakelazaroff 7y ago
They don't want to be held responsible for moderating content, so… they're creating an organization funded solely by themselves. How is that any different from just doing it in-house?
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  It worked well for the movie studios and MPAA. The MPAA ratings board has the veneer of being independent without actually being too independent.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    The MPAA is an Association. It's a small government for studios. It's not intended to be independent, it's intended to balance power along its members. If there was only one studio it could do ratings in-house.
    - ohithereyou 7y ago
      It is likely that an organization like this will become a defacto standard used by all big social networks as a way to get government off their back, much like the Hayes Code and then the MPAA ratings board by the movie industry.
- daenz 7y ago
  Because it lives outside of Facebook and can offer its services to other online communities. It's a smart play if your goal is to own governing worldwide speech.
- cheapsteak 7y ago
  The amount of money required to adequately do what the world wants facebook to do might exceed the amount required to fund the 3rd party org If the org is not as competent as people wish it to be, the blame is somewhat insulated
kleer001 7y ago
The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe as its handle was made of wood and they thought it was one of them.
- InitialLastName 7y ago
  In the absence of any context, adages like this don't add anything to the conversation. Every reader who encounters it will nod and say "yes, that's so true of the other side".
  - kleer001 7y ago
    Thankfully there's the context of OP's post.
whateveracct 7y ago
"Supreme Court"..this sounds nothing like the Supreme Court.
r00fus 7y ago
Great! Corporate takeover of our commons. Sounds completely kosher to me.
pesenti 7y ago
Hey I am a Facebook employee and I am really confused by all the comments here. Really feels like a "Damned if you do/Damned if you don't" situation. Can anybody actually suggest a better alternative? Not saying there isn't one, I am just not seeing one being proposed.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Sometimes you paint yourself into a corner and no good options remain. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.
- annoyingnoob 7y ago
  My solution is do not use Facebook.
  - malloreon 7y ago
    or instagram, or whatsapp, or messenger.
  - rumanator 7y ago
    > My solution is do not use Facebook. How effective is that? Doesn't Facebook collects data on everyone's online behavior even if they don't have an account?
    - annoyingnoob 7y ago
      It may be that FB collects data on everyone they can. The subject of this article is about content/content moderation. If I do not produce or consume content on FB then I might not care about or be subject to any moderation practices.
- bananocurrency 7y ago
  Have you tried not being a total sellout and working for an advertising company?
- burkaman 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Ajedi32 7y ago
This actually does feel like a step in the right direction. Having _any_ sort of appeals process in place is definitely a step up from the Google/YouTube approach of: you can be banned by an automated process for no apparent reason and if that happens there's absolutely nothing you can do about it except raise a stink on social media and hope your story gets enough traction that someone capable of doing something about it notices the problem and fixes it.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Facebook already has an appeals process for content. This just adds another level, and I'm fairly dubious it'd be any less capricious.
rvz 7y ago
The millisecond I clicked on this article, the first sentence looks very strange: > Facebook Inc. will pay $130 million to establish an independent board charged with reviewing how the company moderates its content... First of all, isn't it ironic that the owner of the largest social networks in the world is attempting to fund a independent court / board for content with Facebook money? If they're not the only ones backing this, then both them and private corporations funding this whilst trying to maintain this institution's independent nature is going to have lots of trust issues. Sounds like this is the establishment of the Facebook "Supreme Court" for Content.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > a independent court Facebook picks board members who then pick more board members. The sole financial backer is Facebook. At a whim, Mark Zuckerberg could ignore, re-constitute or disband the board. It's far from independent.
  - sitkack 7y ago
    This is about the time when I pine for a higher fidelity knowledge of history so I could make a pithy comment about the similarities between the reign of the Candy King and ....? Alas I cannot, so I'll just continue to foo(); bar(); baz(); my way along.
knzhou 7y ago
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
- rumanator 7y ago
  > Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Actually, it sounds an awful lot like "damned if you don't, damned if you pretend you do to keep not doing it".
  - knzhou 7y ago
    And what exactly do you think "it" is? In terms of concrete actions for content moderation, not some vague "be good, don't be bad" moralizing.
gesman 7y ago
Wolfs are funding supreme court over fate of sheep.
dvtrn 7y ago
Hrm. I'm curious how this "Supreme Court" will interact with Facebook's cadre of paid content moderators and if that "Supreme Court" will be/will have the power to advocate for that group of workers--or if this is strictly going to be a single-serving organism in the company. I'd certainly be less incredulous about this move were there answers to these inquiries. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
fumar 7y ago
I am not picking on FB here. I find it interesting humans created this network. It has some benefits and plenty of issues due to its business model. There is strength in the network but the network could succumb to a loss of participants and thus lose its power. Why are we not advocating for folks to simply leave the network? I know I am removing lots of the gray areas, but I am genuinely curious. Is there really no other group of builders that can provide the market with a FB alternative? I keep reminding myself that at one point in time AOL felt like the only access point to the internet that mattered...
Animats 7y ago
This sounds like the Hays Office.[1] That was the Motion Picture Association of America's censorship unit from 1934 to 1968. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code
mjfl 7y ago
I can't wait for this brave new world where you will need to implement a $130 million supreme court to start a new social network.
LatteLazy 7y ago
In fairness, here in the UK at least, the print media are going nuts about Facebook and Google failing to stop fake news and politicians' lies. Coincidentally they're bashing their competitors for something they themselves do just as much, make of that what you will... That is one reason fb (and maybe Google too and twitter and whoever else) are donating: make an independent sock puppet, they can decide and you just point at the when people complain. They're a "sin eater". Its not different to how music and movie companies have banded together in the past to deal with "moral" crusades. I guess this is like regulatory capture technically, but where you build the regulator yourself. "Regulatory farming" maybe? Personally I'm very dubious about fb (or anyone else) setting up an "arbiter of truth" and deciding who can advertise and what they can claim. But I prefer to think it's a marketing/political ploy than a dastardly plot to control our reality. They make 1000 times more money selling us sugar and then diet pills than political bs, but the political bs is upsetting that market.
- zmzrr 7y ago
  The mass media is going nuts about not controlling the narrative anymore, that's why they want to bury big tech. They will lose in the end, so I don't know if it's worth it to fight.
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    Big tech also wants to control the narrative. Due to the nature of their platforms, it's much more difficult to do but that hasn't stopped them from making a mess trying.
    - wpasc 7y ago
      I think each time Big Tech tries to control the narrative more and more is a step in a direction that is short sighted. I get wanting to pull down literal Nazis and I mostly agree. But scope creep on who is a Nazi and the ever vaguer "hate speech" will spell true trouble as they get even more unclear.
      - 7y ago
abhchand 7y ago
> While Facebook will select the first 11 members of the board, the eleven will choose the remaining board members, with terms lasting three years. Call me skeptical but that's not enough to distance yourself and set up a "fair" court. Facebook still has lots of influence and I doubt they'll recommend something that would truly hurt Facebook's bottom line.
officeplant 7y ago
They'll need to hire idubbz so they can have a proper content cop for the content court.
9c8675a8 7y ago
FB are morons. They don't get it. Politics in-itself is fakery and nothing but a con; it's never going to change. What's happening now is that a certain group of con artists who have been having it easy now have some competition and they're not used to anything like this.
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/kzokf http://archive.is/kzokf
j-c-hewitt 7y ago
How is the board "independent"? Just calling it "independent" does not make it "independent." It sure sounds better, but "Facebook Creates Star Chamber of Moderators to Rubber Stamp Decisions It Wanted to Make Anyway" doesn't sound as respectable.
jariel 7y ago
HN et. al. have become really quite cynical about FB these days, but I suggest reality is something more pragmatic, however ugly --> yes, FB likes taking money from anyone, but I'll bet they really, really don't want to be in the business of content filtering, or having to make such decisions, and would rather wash their hands of it. There's little pragmatic leadership coming from the powers that be over this stuff - obviously there's a good deal of noise out of governments concerning 'fake news' - but I'd argue it's much more difficult than one would imagine given 100 different nations, different laws, lobbying power, even aside from the concerns over really deciding 'what is fake'. I think a lot of TV spots might reasonably fall under the category of 'not exactly factual' as well. If there were reasonable, clean and coherent direction from US gov (probably not going to happen), it would be easier. A lot of the EU thinking/legislation I suggest mightn't be specifically nuanced enough as well. I am not cynical about this announcement. I'd wager FB would be somewhere in the range of 'happy' to comply with a set of reasonable bits of legislation, especially if was applied universally and coherently. In the absence of anyone actually doing anything, they're going to set it up themselves. Impartial? Hardly, but it's probably better than nothing. $130M is not chump change, this is a big deal. Perhaps wit a change in governance maybe something will happen. (I'm not making a political statement other than to say the Trump regime will never do anything about this). Absent any real collective movement on this issue ... I think this is a positive step. It's better than the status quo.
tolstoshev 7y ago
They're just trying to avoid a ruling like this one: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/583/pruneyard-shopping-center-v-robins https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/583/pruneyard-s... for social media platforms.
pootpucker 7y ago
Who is going to run this board? It's probably going to be the last people on earth you want in those positions.
smsm42 7y ago
So what happens is that Facebook chooses 11 people and gives them money so that they could make Facebook censorship decisions look like they don't come from Facebook. But since they people in that "court" still are appointed by Facebook, that's all just a shell game. But now they can point at "independent verification" by people they chose to pretend there's some objectivity behind it (even though there can't possibly be).

100 points by otterley 7y ago

> A corporate trust managed by financial services firm Brown Brothers Harriman will in turn oversee the board’s budget and administration Any details on how board members will be appointed, vetted and selected? This looks like Facebook creating a red herring it can blame for the consequences of policing its platform.

deusofnull 7y ago
from the article, > While Facebook will select the first 11 members of the board, the eleven will choose the remaining board members, with terms lasting three years. facebook picks the first 11 board members and then those 11 staff new appointments for 3 year terms, but not sure if the first 11 also control staffing throughout the org. if this is a "facebook supreme court" then its kinda fishy if the stakeholders get to appoint the first 11 judges... edit: also, tsk tsk wallstreet journal. if you use numerals (11) in a piece of writing, dont switch to the written number (eleven)!
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > its kinda fishy if the stakeholders get to appoint the first 11 judges So it's a Facebook-controlled board. An honest mechanism would involve outside groups from the start. A legitimate mechanism probably requires the government to step in. This is simply a deflection mechanism, a board for PR. > if you use numerals (11) in a piece of writing, dont switch to the written number (eleven) This is common style advice. The numeral represents a quantity. Written out, it represents the body per se.
  - deusofnull 7y ago
    Frankly i agree about gov intervention in such matters because how can you really, honestly take a company at its word that its self-appointed accountability board is actually independent? Or has power to make decisions that would hurt Facebook. And companies shouldnt really be expected to do that, or at least we shouldnt expect that over a government solution. Something like this is exaccccctly what governments is designed to handle vs what business can be expected to do on its own.
- rumanator 7y ago
  > While Facebook will select the first 11 members of the board, the eleven will choose the remaining board members, with terms lasting three years. So Facebook reserves its right to dictate who serves on the board, whether directly or indirectly.

yingw787 7y ago

$130M sounds like a tiny sum for content arbitration at Facebook’s scale and the number of jurisdictions it crosses. I mean, nobody’s done it before, so it will be interesting. But I don’t think this is or could be a serious attempt to solve the systemic issues at stake with the platform.

DenverR 7y ago

Why does facebook continue to allow the running of political ads and all the headache that comes with it (despite it being a minuscule piece of it's overall revenue)? Power. You can see this as being the most tone-deaf way possible to address the problem, or as a power grab to become an arbiter of truth.

ceejayoz 7y ago
The right-wing has been claiming anti-conservative bias in big tech for a while now. Banning political ads, even if done across the board, would be likely to ramp that up dramatically. https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756734/trump-google-anti-conservative-bias-claims-tweets https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756734/trump-google-anti... For example: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/republicans-criticize-googles-new-policy-reining-in-political-ads-2019-11-26 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/republicans-criticize-goog... > President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and other Republican election groups criticized tech giant Google on Tuesday for making it harder for political advertisers to target specific types of people. The GOP groups said the changes will lead directly to suppressing voter turnout and would “disproportionately” hurt Republican candidates.
- lightbyte 7y ago
  The right-wing makes all sorts of false claims of victim-hood constantly, who cares.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Said right-wing currently controls the Senate, the White House, is appointing large numbers of Federal judges, etc. It's not shocking for Facebook to want to avoid worsening relations with people holding significant power to regulate them. No one really wants to be the subject of a Trump tweetstorm, either.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

riazrizvi 7y ago

Far better* than the alternative, a transparent process to decide what is acceptable content on social media that is managed by the government, you know, democratically. At least this way Facebook owns the process from the get go, it’s the purest form of ‘regulatory capture’. Just imagine if technology companies had to adhere to publishing standard like broadcasters and journalists do, because of regulations. All that money from conspiracy theory political ads targeting niche social groups would evaporate. Social media platforms would be far less political influence. *For Facebook.

gonational 7y ago
In the United States of America we already have something like this, it’s called the 1st Amendment in the Constitution. Since Facebook enjoys the privilege of being classified as a “public square”, they do not have the legal right to censor content at all, unless the content is illegal (threats, etc.). This is not currently being enforced. Imagine being so oppressed that your ego feels the need to down-vote this comment :(
- riazrizvi 7y ago
  1. We also have a Federal Communication Commission which regulates to prevent information broadcasters from abusing their power. 2. > Imagine being so oppressed that your ego feels the need to down-vote this comment :( I don't have the ability to downvote replies. I notice too that your comment has not been edited, so you must have written it at the same time you originally posted before anyone could have upvoted or downvoted you. Why don't you do a quick edit, for appearances sake...

buboard 7y ago

They should name it Goskomizdat

vnchr 7y ago
"Ministry of Truth" has a nice ring to it [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Ministry_of_Truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_of_Nineteen_Eighty-...

jeffdavis 7y ago

What will be the equivalent to the Bill of Rights, on which this new court will base its opinions?

imgabe 7y ago

Facebook: a place to share things approved by a board of corporate trustees.

chadlavi 7y ago

No thanks!

ghostpepper 7y ago

Are we supposed to believe that the people receiving the $130M will be somehow independent and make decisions without influence from Facebook? That doesn't sound very plausible.

ryanisnan 7y ago
> 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. I hope what doesn't happen is that this turns into a way for Facebook to delay/confuse/distort how decisions are made, and ultimately give Facebook itself a way to shirk the blame.
- WarDores 7y ago
  That's exactly what this is. They're trying to avoid regulation of any kind, and "third party audits" are historically a good way to keep the federal government out of your hair for at least a measurable period of time. The financial industry learned this quickly.

brosinante 7y ago

The wolves voting for free range sheep.

jakelazaroff 7y ago

They don't want to be held responsible for moderating content, so… they're creating an organization funded solely by themselves. How is that any different from just doing it in-house?

ohithereyou 7y ago
It worked well for the movie studios and MPAA. The MPAA ratings board has the veneer of being independent without actually being too independent.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  The MPAA is an Association. It's a small government for studios. It's not intended to be independent, it's intended to balance power along its members. If there was only one studio it could do ratings in-house.
  - ohithereyou 7y ago
    It is likely that an organization like this will become a defacto standard used by all big social networks as a way to get government off their back, much like the Hayes Code and then the MPAA ratings board by the movie industry.
daenz 7y ago
Because it lives outside of Facebook and can offer its services to other online communities. It's a smart play if your goal is to own governing worldwide speech.
cheapsteak 7y ago
The amount of money required to adequately do what the world wants facebook to do might exceed the amount required to fund the 3rd party org If the org is not as competent as people wish it to be, the blame is somewhat insulated

kleer001 7y ago

The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe as its handle was made of wood and they thought it was one of them.

InitialLastName 7y ago
In the absence of any context, adages like this don't add anything to the conversation. Every reader who encounters it will nod and say "yes, that's so true of the other side".
- kleer001 7y ago
  Thankfully there's the context of OP's post.

whateveracct 7y ago

"Supreme Court"..this sounds nothing like the Supreme Court.

r00fus 7y ago

Great! Corporate takeover of our commons. Sounds completely kosher to me.

pesenti 7y ago

Hey I am a Facebook employee and I am really confused by all the comments here. Really feels like a "Damned if you do/Damned if you don't" situation. Can anybody actually suggest a better alternative? Not saying there isn't one, I am just not seeing one being proposed.

lonelappde 7y ago
Sometimes you paint yourself into a corner and no good options remain. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.
annoyingnoob 7y ago
My solution is do not use Facebook.
- malloreon 7y ago
  or instagram, or whatsapp, or messenger.
- rumanator 7y ago
  > My solution is do not use Facebook. How effective is that? Doesn't Facebook collects data on everyone's online behavior even if they don't have an account?
  - annoyingnoob 7y ago
    It may be that FB collects data on everyone they can. The subject of this article is about content/content moderation. If I do not produce or consume content on FB then I might not care about or be subject to any moderation practices.
bananocurrency 7y ago
Have you tried not being a total sellout and working for an advertising company?
burkaman 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Ajedi32 7y ago

This actually does feel like a step in the right direction. Having _any_ sort of appeals process in place is definitely a step up from the Google/YouTube approach of: you can be banned by an automated process for no apparent reason and if that happens there's absolutely nothing you can do about it except raise a stink on social media and hope your story gets enough traction that someone capable of doing something about it notices the problem and fixes it.

ceejayoz 7y ago
Facebook already has an appeals process for content. This just adds another level, and I'm fairly dubious it'd be any less capricious.

rvz 7y ago

The millisecond I clicked on this article, the first sentence looks very strange: > Facebook Inc. will pay $130 million to establish an independent board charged with reviewing how the company moderates its content... First of all, isn't it ironic that the owner of the largest social networks in the world is attempting to fund a independent court / board for content with Facebook money? If they're not the only ones backing this, then both them and private corporations funding this whilst trying to maintain this institution's independent nature is going to have lots of trust issues. Sounds like this is the establishment of the Facebook "Supreme Court" for Content.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> a independent court Facebook picks board members who then pick more board members. The sole financial backer is Facebook. At a whim, Mark Zuckerberg could ignore, re-constitute or disband the board. It's far from independent.
- sitkack 7y ago
  This is about the time when I pine for a higher fidelity knowledge of history so I could make a pithy comment about the similarities between the reign of the Candy King and ....? Alas I cannot, so I'll just continue to foo(); bar(); baz(); my way along.

knzhou 7y ago

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

rumanator 7y ago
> Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Actually, it sounds an awful lot like "damned if you don't, damned if you pretend you do to keep not doing it".
- knzhou 7y ago
  And what exactly do you think "it" is? In terms of concrete actions for content moderation, not some vague "be good, don't be bad" moralizing.

gesman 7y ago

Wolfs are funding supreme court over fate of sheep.

dvtrn 7y ago

Hrm. I'm curious how this "Supreme Court" will interact with Facebook's cadre of paid content moderators and if that "Supreme Court" will be/will have the power to advocate for that group of workers--or if this is strictly going to be a single-serving organism in the company. I'd certainly be less incredulous about this move were there answers to these inquiries. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

fumar 7y ago

I am not picking on FB here. I find it interesting humans created this network. It has some benefits and plenty of issues due to its business model. There is strength in the network but the network could succumb to a loss of participants and thus lose its power. Why are we not advocating for folks to simply leave the network? I know I am removing lots of the gray areas, but I am genuinely curious. Is there really no other group of builders that can provide the market with a FB alternative? I keep reminding myself that at one point in time AOL felt like the only access point to the internet that mattered...

Animats 7y ago

This sounds like the Hays Office.[1] That was the Motion Picture Association of America's censorship unit from 1934 to 1968. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

mjfl 7y ago

I can't wait for this brave new world where you will need to implement a $130 million supreme court to start a new social network.

LatteLazy 7y ago

In fairness, here in the UK at least, the print media are going nuts about Facebook and Google failing to stop fake news and politicians' lies. Coincidentally they're bashing their competitors for something they themselves do just as much, make of that what you will... That is one reason fb (and maybe Google too and twitter and whoever else) are donating: make an independent sock puppet, they can decide and you just point at the when people complain. They're a "sin eater". Its not different to how music and movie companies have banded together in the past to deal with "moral" crusades. I guess this is like regulatory capture technically, but where you build the regulator yourself. "Regulatory farming" maybe? Personally I'm very dubious about fb (or anyone else) setting up an "arbiter of truth" and deciding who can advertise and what they can claim. But I prefer to think it's a marketing/political ploy than a dastardly plot to control our reality. They make 1000 times more money selling us sugar and then diet pills than political bs, but the political bs is upsetting that market.

zmzrr 7y ago
The mass media is going nuts about not controlling the narrative anymore, that's why they want to bury big tech. They will lose in the end, so I don't know if it's worth it to fight.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  Big tech also wants to control the narrative. Due to the nature of their platforms, it's much more difficult to do but that hasn't stopped them from making a mess trying.
  - wpasc 7y ago
    I think each time Big Tech tries to control the narrative more and more is a step in a direction that is short sighted. I get wanting to pull down literal Nazis and I mostly agree. But scope creep on who is a Nazi and the ever vaguer "hate speech" will spell true trouble as they get even more unclear.
    - 7y ago

abhchand 7y ago

> While Facebook will select the first 11 members of the board, the eleven will choose the remaining board members, with terms lasting three years. Call me skeptical but that's not enough to distance yourself and set up a "fair" court. Facebook still has lots of influence and I doubt they'll recommend something that would truly hurt Facebook's bottom line.

officeplant 7y ago

They'll need to hire idubbz so they can have a proper content cop for the content court.

9c8675a8 7y ago

FB are morons. They don't get it. Politics in-itself is fakery and nothing but a con; it's never going to change. What's happening now is that a certain group of con artists who have been having it easy now have some competition and they're not used to anything like this.

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/kzokf http://archive.is/kzokf

j-c-hewitt 7y ago

How is the board "independent"? Just calling it "independent" does not make it "independent." It sure sounds better, but "Facebook Creates Star Chamber of Moderators to Rubber Stamp Decisions It Wanted to Make Anyway" doesn't sound as respectable.

jariel 7y ago

HN et. al. have become really quite cynical about FB these days, but I suggest reality is something more pragmatic, however ugly --> yes, FB likes taking money from anyone, but I'll bet they really, really don't want to be in the business of content filtering, or having to make such decisions, and would rather wash their hands of it. There's little pragmatic leadership coming from the powers that be over this stuff - obviously there's a good deal of noise out of governments concerning 'fake news' - but I'd argue it's much more difficult than one would imagine given 100 different nations, different laws, lobbying power, even aside from the concerns over really deciding 'what is fake'. I think a lot of TV spots might reasonably fall under the category of 'not exactly factual' as well. If there were reasonable, clean and coherent direction from US gov (probably not going to happen), it would be easier. A lot of the EU thinking/legislation I suggest mightn't be specifically nuanced enough as well. I am not cynical about this announcement. I'd wager FB would be somewhere in the range of 'happy' to comply with a set of reasonable bits of legislation, especially if was applied universally and coherently. In the absence of anyone actually doing anything, they're going to set it up themselves. Impartial? Hardly, but it's probably better than nothing. $130M is not chump change, this is a big deal. Perhaps wit a change in governance maybe something will happen. (I'm not making a political statement other than to say the Trump regime will never do anything about this). Absent any real collective movement on this issue ... I think this is a positive step. It's better than the status quo.

tolstoshev 7y ago

They're just trying to avoid a ruling like this one: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/583/pruneyard-shopping-center-v-robins https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/583/pruneyard-s... for social media platforms.

pootpucker 7y ago

Who is going to run this board? It's probably going to be the last people on earth you want in those positions.

smsm42 7y ago

So what happens is that Facebook chooses 11 people and gives them money so that they could make Facebook censorship decisions look like they don't come from Facebook. But since they people in that "court" still are appointed by Facebook, that's all just a shell game. But now they can point at "independent verification" by people they chose to pretend there's some objectivity behind it (even though there can't possibly be).