Facebook shares draft proposal describing how its new content review board could work, suggesting it have 40 diverse members, none of whom are Facebook staff
with many open questions, a public consultation process, and an exploration of considerations. http://newsroom.fb.com/... Jonathan Zittrain / @zittrain : Facebook announces next steps towards an external board “able to reverse Facebook's decisions about whether to allow or remove certain posts on the platform.” http://newsroom.fb.com/.... This would be a rare and fascinating, if narrow, devolution of authority. h/t @Klonick Derek Powazek / @fraying : This is another elaborate attempt to avoid responsibility, and another example of mistaking content moderation for governance. http://newsroom.fb.com/... Jamison Foser / @jamisonfoser : It's gonna be, like, James Bennet and Ann Coulter isn't it? http://twitter.com/... Kate Klonick / @klonick : This. Separation of powers. Institution building. Constitution writing. We're watching history happen. Will 2020 be the 1776 of online speech? Makes me wonder if the Founding Fathers ever felt they were up against a dystopian future. . . In any event, what a time to be alive. http://twitter.com/... Ian Millhiser / @imillhiser : I'm agnostic about whether this is a good idea, but one rule that Facebook must follow if anyone is to take this board seriously is that, for every board member from a conservative outlet, there must be a countervailing member from a liberal outlet. http://twitter.com/... Sheera Frenkel / @sheeraf : Facebook has announced an external board, which it says will provide oversight on removing content from the platform. So many questions on how this will work, and who will sit on it,. http://newsroom.fb.com/... David Kaye / @davidakaye : today #Facebook released a ‘draft charter’ for content ‘oversight board’ & announced 6 mo's of consultations. on quick review impressive start. deserves study, critique, eval - & if it helps solve probs of (eg) transparency & user autonomy, maybe support. http://newsroom.fb.com/... Sarah Frier / @sarahfrier : Facebook is consulting with “experts in diverse disciplines” to come up with its board that will review content policy. So everyone will be happy with the ultimate oversight decisions, right? http://newsroom.fb.com/... http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This draft charter is the opening move in what became a two-year build-out of Facebook's Oversight Board: it precedes the $130M initial commitment that funded the body, the proposed bylaws that critics said left Facebook firmly in control, and the eventual seating of the first 20 of 40 members. The design choices visible here — 40 diverse members, none on staff, power to reverse removal and allowance decisions, a public consultation process — set the terms of every later fight over the board's independence.
What's being devolved is real but narrow: until now, calls on what stays up have sat with an internal content policy team of several dozen engineers, lawyers, and PR people, which is exactly why skeptics like Derek Powazek read the board as elaborate responsibility avoidance rather than governance.
First-order effects
- Facebook's internal policy team no longer has the final word on contested posts — the draft gives the external board authority to review and reverse both removals and allowances, creating an appeal layer above the in-house team.
- Users and advocacy groups get a formal consultation channel into content policy for the first time, shifting some rule-making debate out of private escalation and into a public process.
Second-order effects
- Funding and member selection remain Facebook-controlled even as adjudication is outsourced, so the bylaws stage becomes the battleground over whether the board can rule against the company that pays for it.
- Rival platforms face pressure to answer the same legitimacy gap with their own review mechanisms — a question the board's co-chair later made explicit by inviting other tech companies to work with it if the model succeeds.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large platforms converge on quasi-judicial appeal bodies for content calls — though the board's inability to mandate codes of conduct or minimize harm directly means the underlying policy power stays with the companies.
- Content moderation increasingly splits into two layers: corporate enforcement that scales automatically, and a thin external judiciary handling only the contested edge cases — a structure regulators may treat as evidence platforms can self-govern.
The trend: Platform speech decisions are migrating from opaque internal policy teams toward contestable external review bodies, with Facebook's Oversight Board as the template others are invited to adopt.