Profile of Miranda Sissons, hired by Facebook last November as its first human rights chief, as Facebook struggles with waves of online hate against minorities
Context & Ripple Effects
This profile closes a loop Facebook opened in September 2018, when it began searching for a Director of Human Rights Policy to steer investigations into abusers on its platforms. Miranda Sissons, hired last November as the company's first human rights chief, is the person who landed that mandate — and she inherits it at the moment Facebook's role in Myanmar and other geopolitical crises has forced the company to stand up a dedicated Strategic Response team for exactly these situations.
First-order effects
- Sissons now owns the file on waves of online hate against minorities, giving Facebook's ad-hoc crisis responses — like the Strategic Response team's work on Myanmar — a permanent executive owner for the first time.
Second-order effects
- The hire hardens a template rivals and regulators can point to: once one major platform has a named human rights chief, peer platforms face pressure to create equivalent roles rather than absorb the work into policy teams.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Sissons followed by the hiring of civil rights attorney Roy L. Austin, Jr. to build a civil rights organization inside the company — human rights oversight becomes a standing corporate function at large platforms rather than a reactive patch after each crisis.
The trend: Major social platforms are converting episodic content-crisis response into permanent human rights and civil rights governance structures inside the company.