![]() However, Thorning-Schmidt argued that private companies should not be the ones to define free expression either and that the global community had a right to look over their shoulders. “We mustn’t forget the voice and the agency that social media has given millions and millions of people,” she said. She said the Russian, Turkish and Chinese governments would like nothing more than to have further justification for controlling online expression. We have to remember that half the world’s population don’t live in democracies.” “It isn’t right for governments to take decisions on freedom of expression. But she said she was strongly opposed to government regulation of free speech. In response, Thorning-Schmidt said that tougher regulation of the big technology companies might well be appropriate in areas such as tax and possibly antitrust. “It isn’t right for governments to take decisions on freedom of expression.” The UK government is also pushing an Online Safety Bill that would impose a particular “duty of care” on social media companies. The European Union has recently published its draft Digital Services Act, defining the big US tech platforms as “gatekeepers” that have special responsibilities. Other commentators have interpreted Facebook’s move as regulatory “preemption” attempting to head off intervention from governments. Some industry experts have even launched an alternative Real Facebook Oversight Board to “respond to the critical threats posed by Facebook’s unchecked power.” The oversight board’s critics argue that Facebook’s initiative is “regulation theatre” designed to distract attention from its inability to moderate the torrent of toxic content that has spread disinformation, extremism and online hate. ![]() Facebook can also refer its own decisions to the board, as it did with Trump. To date, some 300,000 Facebook users have appealed to the board against content bans although the board only has the capacity to consider a tiny fraction of them. The board, which started work last year, is now the final arbiter for content decisions for Facebook’s 2.5bn users and Instagram’s 1bn users and can also make non-binding recommendations about the company’s policies. So far leading social media companies such as Twitter, Reddit and YouTube have shown no public signs of interest in joining the board.īut the comments by Thorning-Schmidt are the most explicit yet and give a sense of how seriously it’s being taken by the oversight board’s top members.įacebook has so far committed $130m to funding the oversight board and recruited 20 politicians, lawyers, academics and journalists as members, including Thorning-Schmidt, Tawakkol Karman, the Nobel Prize winning Yemeni civil rights activist and Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian. While little noticed at the time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2019 said in a letter about the board: “ We hope it will expand its scope and potentially include more companies across the industry.” More recently, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg raised the prospect of an industry-wide oversight board at a FT event earlier this year and an official Rachel Wolbers also raised a similar hope in March. This is not the first time that the idea of an expanded Facebook oversight board policing the industry has been mooted. “Maybe, who knows, this could be taken over by multilateral organisations in the future.” An industry-wide oversight board She added that the board might even one day be folded into a multilateral organisation like the UN so it was fully independent from Facebook. “We are set up for other companies to join in the future.” “I don’t see the UN coming up with a solution that could work as quickly as the Facebook oversight board and that would have the right funding, the right members and that could take independent decisions that could be respected by the social media companies,” she said in an interview with Sifted.
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