The Most Important Part Of The Facebook / Oversight Board Interaction Happened Last Week And Almost No One Cared

The whole dynamic between Facebook and the Oversight Board has received lots of attention -- with many people insisting that the Board's lack of official power makes it effectively useless. The specifics, again, for most of you not deep in the weeds on this: Facebook has only agreed to be bound by the Oversight Board's decisions on a very narrow set of issues: if a specific piece of content was taken down and the Oversight Board says it should have been left up. Beyond that, the Oversight Board can make recommendations on policy issues, but the companies doesn't need to follow them. I think this is a legitimate criticism and concern, but it's also a case where if Facebook itself actually does follow through on the policy recommendations, and everybody involved acts as if the Board has real power... then the norms around it might mean that it does have that power (at least until there's a conflict, and you end up in the equivalent of a Constitutional crisis).

And while there's been a tremendous amount of attention paid to the Oversight Board's first set of rulings, and to the fact that Facebook asked it to review the Trump suspension, last week something potentially much more important and interesting happened. With those initial rulings on the "up/down" question, the Oversight Board also suggested a pretty long list of policy recommendations for Facebook. Again, under the setup of the Board, Facebook only needed to consider these, but was not bound to enact them.

Last week Facebook officially responded to those recommendations, saying that it had agreed to take action on 11 of the 17 recommendations, is assessing the feasibility on another five, and was taking no action on just one. The company summarized those decisions in that link above, and put out a much more detailed pdf exploring the recommendations and Facebook's response. It's actually interesting reading (or, at least for someone like me who likes to dig deep into the nuances of content moderation).

Since I'm sure it's most people's first question: the one "no further action" was in response to a policy recommendation regarding COVID-19 misinformation. The Board had recommended that when a user posts information that disagrees with advice from health authorities, but where the "potential for physical harm is identified but is not imminent" that "Facebook should adopt a range of less intrusive measures." Basically, removing such information may not always make sense, especially if it's not clear that the information in disagreement with health authorities might not be actively harmful. As per usual, there's a lot of nuance here. As we discussed, early in the pandemic, the suggestions from "health authorities" later turned out to be inaccurate (like the WHO and CDC telling people not to wear masks in many cases). That makes relying on those health authorities as the be all, end all for content moderation for disinformation inherently difficult.

The Oversight Board's response in this issue more or less tried to walk that line, recognizing that health authorities' advice may adapt over time as more information becomes clear, and automatically silencing those who push back on the official suggestions from health officials may lead to over-blocking. But, obviously, this is a hellishly nuanced and complex topic. Part of the issue is that -- especially in a rapidly changing situation, where our knowledge base starts out with little information and is constantly correcting -- it's difficult to tell who is pushing back against official advice for good reasons or for conspiracy theory nonsense reasons (and there's a very wide spectrum between those two things). That creates (yet again) an impossible situation. The Oversight Board was suggesting that Facebook should be at least somewhat more forgiving in such situations, as long as they don't see any "imminent" harm from those disagreeing with health officials.

Facebook's response isn't so much pushing back against the Board's recommendation -- but rather to argue that it already takes a "less intrusive" approach. It