San Francisco, Facebook is inviting inputs from people around the world to build an independent body that will be able to reverse the social networking giant’s decisions about allowing or removing certain posts on the platform.
Given the size of its community — over two billion globally — Facebook felt that it should not alone be making all the decisions about what content should stay up and what should come down, based on its community standards.
In November 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out a plan for a new way for people to appeal content decisions to an independent board.
“Today, we’re opening a public consultation process to help us answer questions around the design for this Oversight Board,” Brent Harris, Facebook’s Director of Governance and Oversight Board, wrote in a blog post on Monday.
“This is another part of our ongoing, global engagement with a wide range of organisations, think-tanks and researchers to determine how best to empower this entity to render independent judgment on some of Facebook’s most important and challenging content decisions,” Harris said.
There are two sections of this consultation. The first section is a questionnaire and the second section includes three essay questions, which will ask for open-ended perspectives on board membership, decisions and governance.
“In June, we’ll publish a report summarising what we’ve learned through these submissions and in the broader conversations we’re having,” Harris said.
