Facebook: Oversight Board vs Management
Facebook is facing strong criticism from its Oversight Board that in a report says the company has refused to answer some questions and in other cases it has given the Board misleading answers.
“Over the last several weeks, media reporting has drawn renewed attention to the seemingly inconsistent way in which Facebook makes decisions, and why greater transparency and independent oversight of Facebook matter so much for users”, the Board said.
“In areas where we feel that Facebook is falling short, such as transparency, we will keep challenging the company to do better.”
The report concludes that Facebook has not been fully forthcoming with the Board on its ‘cross-check’ system, which the company uses to review content decisions relating to high-profile users.
Between October 2020 and the end of June 2021, Facebook and Instagram users submitted around 524,000 cases to the Board. User appeals increased in each quarter, with around 114,000 cases in the fourth quarter of 2020, 203,000 cases in the first quarter of 2021, and around 207,000 cases in the second quarter of 2021.
Two thirds of appeals where users wanted their content restored related to hate speech or bullying. A third of cases submitted to the Board (36%) related to content concerning Facebook’s rules on Hate Speech.
46% of cases submitted came from the US Canada, while 22% of cases came from Europe and 16% from Latin America and the Caribbean. 8% of cases came from the Asia Pacific Oceania region, 4% came from the Middle East and North Africa, 2% came from Central and South Asia and 2% came from Sub-Saharan Africa.
”We do not believe this represents the actual distribution of Facebook content issues around the globe. If anything, we have reason to believe that users in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East experience more, not fewer, problems with Facebook than parts of the world with more appeals”, the Board says.
”We are expanding our outreach in these areas to ensure that Board oversight extends to users everywhere, and we ask that users and civil society organizations in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East take notice of our concern and bring appeals when they suffer the effects of poor content moderation by Facebook in their areas.”
To assist with making our decisions and to push Facebook to be as transparent as possible, the Board sends questions to Facebook about specific cases.
“Of the 156 questions sent to Facebook about decisions we published through the end of June, Facebook answered 130, partially answered 12 and declined to answer 14.”
“In the Board’s view, the team within Facebook tasked with providing information has not been fully forthcoming on cross-check. On some occasions, Facebook failed to provide relevant information to the Board, while in other instances, the information it did provide was incomplete.”
”When Facebook referred the case related to former US President Trump to the Board, it did not mention the cross-check system. Given that the referral included a specific policy question about account-level enforcement for political leaders, many of whom the Board believes were covered by cross-check, this omission is not acceptable. Facebook only mentioned cross-check to the Board when we asked whether Mr. Trump’s page or account had been subject to ordinary content moderation processes.”
”In its subsequent briefing to the Board, Facebook admitted it should not have said that cross-check only applied to a “small number of decisions.” Facebook noted that for teams operating at the scale of millions of content decisions a day, the numbers involved with cross-check seem relatively small, but recognized its phrasing could come across as misleading.”
”Transparency is clearly an area where Facebook must urgently improve, and we want to be part of the solution.”
The report is signed by Catalina Botero-Marino, Jamal Greene, Michael McConnell, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Co-Chairs of the Oversight Board.
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