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In 1st Big Test, Oversight Board Says Facebook, Not Trump, Is The Problem - NPR

In 1st Big Test, Oversight Board Says Facebook, Not Trump, Is The Problem - NPR

In 1st Big Test, Oversight Board Says Facebook, Not Trump, Is The Problem - NPR
May 07, 2021 1 min, 50 secs

Facebook's Oversight Board says the company, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, must take responsibility for its decisions.

Facebook's Oversight Board says the company, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, must take responsibility for its decisions.

Facebook has almost 2 billion daily users, annual revenue that rivals some countries' gross domestic product, and even its own version of a Supreme Court: the Oversight Board, which the company created to review its toughest decisions on what people can post on its platforms.

The board's response in this case may have been more than Facebook was counting on when it set up the advisory body.

The board zeroed in on something critics have said for a long time: The way Facebook enforces its rules can seem arbitrary.

The board said the company should generally apply its rules equally, no matter whether the user is the president or an average citizen.

The board said Facebook should do a better job explaining its "newsworthiness" policy and how it applies to "influential accounts." Under that policy, Facebook doesn't take down posts that break its rules if the company thinks they are "newsworthy and in the public interest." (Facebook said it never applied this policy to any of Trump's posts.).

The board said the opaqueness of the newsworthiness policy makes it seem like Facebook "may be unduly influenced by political or commercial considerations"— in other words, that it's dodging criticism from Republicans or looking out for the bottom line.

"The board's job is to make sure that Facebook is doing its job," he said.

Tensions between the board's view of the scope of its role and Facebook's were also evident in the board's revelation that the company wouldn't answer seven of the 46 questions it asked about the Trump case.

Critics have seized on these shortcomings — such as the board's inability to force Facebook to answer questions it doesn't want to, and its lack of any legal or enforcement authority — to make the case that the board is little more than a fig leaf for Facebook's lack of accountability.

"This [Oversight Board] might not be the perfect solution, but it is much better than Facebook doing it themselves or a government taking these decisions," she told Axios

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