This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Will Facebook respect international rights or the whims of angry rulers?

By:   []

Date: 2021-11

Facebook’s ‘Trump ban’ received breathless coverage earlier this year, when the Facebook Oversight Board (FOB) – the supposedly independent entity established by the tech giant to adjudicate its content decisions – ‘ruled’ that the former president’s ban from the social media site should be upheld.

Experts from WIRED’s Gilad Edelman to scholar Kate Klonick have used the Trump decision to argue that the FOB is working.

But buried amidst that coverage – and that surrounding Facebook’s botched handling of COVID disinformation – are a muddle of decisions indicating that Facebook and its Oversight Board are making little progress towards a consistent policy on human rights. In fact, they may be headed towards a showdown.

To understand the frailty of the FOB’s decision-making, we need to look beyond the US. Since its inception in October 2020, the FOB has sought to apply international human rights standards to its decisions on Facebook’s content policies, from the Trump decision to its more recent ruling on freedom of expression in Russia.

While the head of the FOB has promised to hold Facebook to such standards, the company itself often favors local laws over international norms. In the recent case of bullying in Russia, “[we] found that while the removal was in line with the Bullying and Harassment Community Standard,” wrote the FOB in a recent ruling, “[Facebook’s rules] are an unnecessary and disproportionate restriction on free expression under international human rights standards”.

The debate is playing out in Myanmar, where Facebook’s algorithms promoted pro-military propaganda even after it banned accounts linked to the military. It has played out in India, and in Israel and Palestine, where Facebook is constantly recalibrating if it will abide by the laws of a nation-state or follow, as the Oversight Board says it will, international rights law. In these cases, Facebook has lurched uncomfortably from one extreme to the other, alternately censoring user posts at the behest of governments, then sometimes back again.

These are consequential decisions that beg answers to the questions: does Facebook follow international rights law, or the whims of angry rulers? What national laws does Facebook follow? And will Facebook listen to its own Oversight Board on human rights?

Toothless watchdog?

openDemocracy understands that the Oversight Board is not consulted ahead of any initial decisions regarding Facebook content or policies – and is instead viewed by the social media giant as a user grievance mechanism. What’s more, the board’s recommendations to Facebook are also non-binding, leaving the company itself to decide whether to implement them.

The charter of the FOB grants powers to the board to request Facebook provides information for its inquiries, but places no corresponding obligation on the company to comply with such requests. This carefully crafted constitution helps Facebook avoid serious scrutiny into its methods, as evidenced in the Trump decision where Facebook declined to answer seven of the board’s 46 questions because, as stated by the company:
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/digitaliberties/will-facebook-respect-international-rights-or-the-whims-of-angry-rulers/
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