#FACEBOOK OVERSIGHT SERIES#

Through its Trustees, the Trust then created a private entity named Oversight Board LLC, a name both suggestive and misleading since Oversight Board is not a board, per se.

Subsequently, in October 2019, Facebook settled the $130 million Oversight Board Trust as its sole Settlor. To address this “reputational squall,” Clegg conditioned his joining Facebook on the aggressive insistence that Facebook, as “a company with more than 2 billion users,” start acting like a “global power…and go out and engage with the messiness of the real world.” While transitioning to his current role with Facebook, in Fall of 2018, Clegg described Zuckerberg as being “under no illusions about the reputational squall” of the company he leads. Many credit Sir Nick Clegg, former British Deputy Prime Minister and Facebook’s current Vice-President of Global Affairs and Communications, for forcing action on the business risk confronting Facebook as a result of its mounting scandals. This scandal was in addition to growing concern about the polarizing effects of Facebook’s algorithms on society and Facebook’s algorithm-driven censorship practices. Zuckerberg’s announcement was made on the heels of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal that broke in the Spring of 2018 when a whistleblower reported that Facebook had allowed a company that sold psychological profiles of voters to political campaigns to harvest detailed personal information from up to 87 million Facebook profiles. There, Zuckerberg envisaged an entity that would prevent concentration of decision-making within Facebook as a business, enhance accountability and oversight of Facebook’s content decisions, and assure that content decisions were being made in the best interests of Facebook as a community, rather than merely for commercial purposes. Facebook first announced such a possibility in November 2018 in a note posted to the platform by its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In the face of conflicting characterizations and persistent controversy surrounding Facebook’s business activities, how do lawyers, particularly business lawyers, understand and evaluate Oversight Board’s novel construction, that claims to incorporate principles of the rule of law and international human rights into the core of its activities? THE STRUCTURES OF OVERSIGHT BOARDĪs one of the world’s largest and most prominent social media platforms, Facebook has responded to increasing demand for the regulation of social media companies in a novel manner, by creating a separate private business entity to advise a narrow band of its content decisions. Most recently, placing board members on par with journalists, academics, and other members of civil society, the board characterized its work as a mere “part” of a “collective effort” to steer Facebook towards greater transparency. In stark contrast, Oversight Board uses more narrow terminology to describe itself, using little more than its own highly suggestive name and sharply defined contractual terms. Oversight Board has been referred to as “an elaborate structure for a supposedly independent body to review…content decisions” and “a group of own making.” It has also been called an “independent body,” an “independent panel,” and a “quasi-independent oversight board.” Some reports have gone so far as calling it Facebook’s “Supreme Court,” “a quasi-judicial organization,” or even an “international human rights tribunal.” These descriptions are neither fitting nor accurate. Press reports have referred to Facebook’s Oversight Board using a range of descriptors from the cynical to the ridiculous.

#FACEBOOK OVERSIGHT SERIES#

This article is the third in a series on intersections between business law and the rule of law and their importance for business lawyers, created by the American Bar Association Business Law Section’s Rule of Law Working Group.

Facebook oversight