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Facebook’s Oversight Board, the independent organization overseeing the social network’s content moderation decisions, is ready to start considering which cases to weigh in on. The board announced that it will begin taking appeals from Facebook and Instagram users who “have exhausted the company’s appeal process.”
The update marks the first time the group will actually be operational and ready to rule on Facebook’s most controversial content decisions. Notably, the milestone also happens to come less than two weeks before the presidential election.
Despite the timing though, it doesn’t sound like the board is anticipating making any election-related decisions — at least not in the near term. “The Board has said it will select their first case to hear within the next few weeks, and according to the bylaws, Board decisions will be issued and implemented within 90 days of Facebook’s final decision on a case,” Facebook wrote in a statement. In other words: it could still be another several months before the board makes its first decision.
The board, which was first announced in 2018, is made up of 20 journalists, lawyers, activists and even a former prime minister, and has been labeled by some outside the company as “Facebook’s Supreme Court.” Though any Facebook or Instagram user who is upset by the company’s decisions — either to remove a piece of content or leave something up — can appeal to the oversight board, the group will only weigh in on a fraction of those appeals. Facebook can also escalate particularly weighty decisions to the Oversight Board directly.
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