Facebook Oversight Board May Gradually Expand

ASPEN, Colorado -- The Facebook oversight board may gradually expand its membership and could theoretically double from 20, the Technology Policy Institute was told Monday. More members could handle additional cases, TPI heard. Though there's no current plan to vastly increase its size, some members probably will be added, including later this year, the Facebook panel's representatives told us on the event's sidelines.

"I expect it won't be all in one fell swoop," said co-Chair Michael McConnell of such enlargement, speaking with reporters. He and a spokesperson noted the board has made about 60 recommendations and the company says it would implement about half.

The oversight members generally defended their recommendations that the social media platform be more specific on its suspension of Donald Trump. The board had backed the Jan. 7 decision to restrict the then-president's access, saying it wasn't "appropriate" to impose an indefinite and standardless suspension (see 2105050009). The company then suspended him until at least January 2023. Before issuing the recommendation, the committee knew "everybody is going to hate our decision no matter what we did," McConnell told TPI. "We just tried to do what would be right."

Some consumers thought the company should be told to "throw away the key and make it permanent and maybe throw in thumbscrews as an additional penalty," McConnell said of the Trump recommendation. "So we knew that there was going to be opposition." The "decision was not about Trump. Our decision was about Facebook," he said: Indefinitely removing Trump without more rationale wasn't the best way to proceed. "We threw it back to them and said, 'Do it right,'" he noted. "They took it back and redid it and they had a definite period of time and they gave an explanation." He thinks "the temperature of the whole matter did go down because of the whole process."

Asked about the company cutting off data access to New York University researchers, oversight board member Julie Owono responded on a panel that generally and personally speaking, it’s “extremely important” to have multistakeholder coordination on content moderation. "The researchers gathered data by creating a browser extension that was programmed to evade our detection systems and scrape data ... some of which is not publicly-viewable on Facebook," blogged Product Management Director Mike Clark Aug. 3.

There's optimism about the relationship between the Facebook oversight board and the company, said Owono and McConnell. Though the social media platform doesn't always follow the panel's recommendations, it's a learning process and sometimes the board could improve its suggestions, McConnell said. “We’re not 100% right, either. Sometimes, it’s proven that maybe some of our recommendations are too vague. I actually am cheerful on the record with Facebook.” McConnell, a Stanford Law School professor, noted if Facebook weren't taking action, it would be bad public relations.

Oversight board reps noted that TPI was their first meeting in person. The board generally has been convening virtually, they said in interviews. Owono said that she had met face to face with Cato Institute's John Samples, a fellow board member, but that before meeting McConnell in Aspen, that may have been it for seeing her colleagues in person. Owono is executive director of Internet Without Borders.

Asked by reporters about having a privacy oversight board, the oversight reps noted the content moderation decisions they focus on and privacy matters require different expertise. McConnell said he's an expert on free speech. On changing Communications Decency Act Section 230, he said to "let the government decide how it wants to regulate." And "if self-regulation works, there is less need for" government action, he said.