Sources: Facebook has approached experts about forming an advisory body for how it handles global election matters, including political ads and misinformation
The social network has contacted academics to create a group to advise it on thorny election-related decisions, said people with knowledge of the matter.
The reported outreach to academics about a standing advisory body on global elections — covering political ads and misinformation — would move election advice from episodic war rooms and ad hoc researcher projects to a permanent internal structure, and it lands just as Facebook faces a rival external board of its own critics.
First-order effects
The academics Facebook approaches would gain a formal channel into decisions on political ads and misinformation, replacing the ad hoc staffer-researcher pairing of the 2020 election research project.
Second-order effects
A company-organized advisory body competes for legitimacy with the Real Facebook Oversight Board, which formed precisely to critique Facebook's moderation decisions from the outside.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — task force to clearances to war room to research project to advisory body — Facebook's election governance keeps institutionalizing internally, pre-empting external regulators and watchdogs with its own expert apparatus.
The trend: Platform governance is migrating from improvised crisis response toward permanent, expert-staffed advisory structures that platforms build themselves.
I don't want to be relentlessly negative, but it *is* an issue that all the brain power on the Oversight Board is now corporately hobbled by significant cash sums and NDAs. Buying dissent /constructing oversight can be seen as two sides of the same coin
here's some news: Facebook is considering creating an Election-related Issues Commission, similar to the Oversight Board it spun up in recent years story by @RMac18, @sheeraf and me https://www.nytimes.com/...
NEW: Facebook has been talking to academics about creating an election advisory board similar to its Oversight Board. It would allow FB to offload decision-making responsibility and free them of having to make calls on thorny voting and political issues. https://www.nytimes.com/.…
So FB is going to handpick their own oversight board (again; 3rd time), then say that oversight board is “independent” (again; 2nd, maybe 3rd time), then, when shit inevitably goes bad, wash their hands of the whole thing and say they had nothing to do with it. Again. Just... Wow…
As a constitutional scholar, I have to ask what happens when the Facebook Supreme Court disagrees with the Facebook Election Commission. https://www.nytimes.com/...
i look forward to the details, but any such “commission” (as if it's a public body for a govt!) cannot be centralized to be of use in specific national contexts. iow, you need separate oversight for every election to be meaningfully expert on content, ads, manipulation, etc. http…
The proposed Facebook election commission could decide on matters such as political ads and their viability and concerns around election-related misinformation, New York Times reported. https://news.abs-cbn.com/...
Improved decision making is definitely needed. Interesting to see how this develops. Would external advisors stop issues such as the shutting down of the NYO/Tanden research? Or draw up rules for how the company should interact with major clients (political parties)? https://twit…
Positive thoughts - this might work to make things slightly better. Negative thought - another tranche of experts neutralized by cash from making good contributions on reform for wider civil society à la the Oversight Board https://www.nytimes.com/...
Zuckerberg thinks this is also a messaging problem. Listening to @sheeraf and @ceciliakang's book - Ugly Truth. It's not a messaging problem. @Facebook is systemically broken. https://twitter.com/...