The Facebook Oversight Board: How to Make It Actually Work

“Accordingly, we believe that Facebook could streamline its appeals process by following the guidelines suggested above.”

The Facebook Oversight Board is busy. This board, which officially began operating in October of last year, has 20 part-time committee members. Members include well-known academics, activists, and attorneys from numerous countries. (One board member, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, is even a former head of state.) The board reportedly has already received 300,000 appeals from users regarding Facebook content enforcement actions. As of April 14th, however, it has rendered only 8 decisions. Similarly, the Supreme Court of the United States hears approximately 76 cases per year out of more than 7,000 requests. However, the Supreme Court sits as the ultimate appeals court after cases are adjudicated in 94 Federal District Courts (where approximately 400,000 cases are heard annually) and 13 Federal Courts of Appeal (where approximately 45,000 appeals cases are heard annually). There are no similar, lower-level Facebook boards to hear appeals prior to one being escalated to this Oversight Board.

Facebook recently announced this board would now also consider user appeals to have other users’ content removed, if Facebook did not itself already remove such content. This policy change will dramatically increase the number of appeals sent to the board and further reduce its capacity to issue rulings. As such, the board is in danger of becoming further clogged and also being used as a tool to expand censorship, particularly if influential users can simply appeal to have content from less popular users taken down. Faced with such a massive (and increasing) number of user appeals, as well as no intermediate boards to help manage the caseload, the Oversight Board will not be able to offer an effective appeals mechanism to prevent censorship without changes to how it operates.

As such, we at First and Fourteenth Institute (FAFI) would like to propose five policy changes to help the Facebook Oversight Board be more effective.