The Facebook Oversight Board: Creating an Independent Institution to Adjudicate Online Free Expression
The Facebook Oversight Board: Creating an Independent Institution to Adjudicate Online Free Expression
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Facebook 监督委员会：创建一个独立机构来裁决在线言论自由
DOI：
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发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
W. Castelli
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
W. Kannel;W. Castelli
十五年来，脸书一直主导着数字社交网络领域，成为网络言论最具影响力的仲裁者之一。每周七天、每天二十四小时，超过20亿用户利用该平台发布、分享、讨论、回应以及获取来自全球各地的内容。通过一套名为“社区标准”的半公开规则体系，脸书制定了一系列“法律”和治理制度，规定了用户在平台上可以说什么。近年来，随着这个精心构建的、用于行使公司对公众言论权的巨大私权力的体系日益凸显，脸书面临着巨大的压力，需要在制定言论基本政策以及执行这些政策方面，变得更具责任感、更透明、更民主。
2018年11月，在媒体、倡导团体和用户多年的恳请之后，首席执行官兼创始人马克·扎克伯格宣布，脸书将组建一个独立的监督机构，并在当年内进行研究、创建和启动。该机构的明确目的是作为用户内容的上诉审查系统，并向脸书提出内容管理政策建议。本文实证性地记录了这一机构（现称脸书监督委员会）的创建过程。该委员会在范围和规模上都是一项具有历史意义的尝试。
本文追溯了促使脸书决定创建监督委员会的事件和影响因素。它详细描述了创建该委员会长达一年的过程，这一过程基于对负责研究、规划和构建这一新机构的治理团队进行的数百小时的访谈和嵌入式研究。
监督委员会的创建及其目标是互联网治理的一种新的表述方式。本文阐明了这一新机构对全球言论自由的未来影响。通过裁决的视角，它分析了该委员会是什么，对用户意味着什么，对行业和政府又意味着什么。最终，本文得出结论：脸书监督委员会在为用户参与私人平台治理以及用户在内容管理方面的程序权利方面树立新的先例方面具有巨大潜力。
For a decade and a half, Facebook has dominated the landscape of digital social networks, becoming one of the most powerful arbiters of online speech. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, over two billion users leverage the platform to post, share, discuss, react to, and access content from all over the globe. Through a system of semipublic rules called “Community Standards,” Facebook has created a body of “laws” and a system of governance that dictate what users may say on the platform. In recent years, as this intricately built system to dispatch the company’s immense private power over the public right of speech has become more visible, Facebook has experienced intense pressure to become more accountable, transparent, and democratic, not only in how it creates its fundamental policies for speech but also in how it enforces them.
In November 2018, after years of entreaty from the press, advocacy groups, and users, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would construct an independent oversight body to be researched, created, and launched within the year. The express purpose of this body was to serve as an appellate review system for user content and to make content-moderation policy recommendations to Facebook. This Feature empirically documents the creation of this institution, now called the Facebook Oversight Board. The Board is a historic endeavor both in scope and scale.
The Feature traces the events and influences that led to Facebook’s decision to create the Oversight Board. It details the year-long process of creating the Board, relying on hundreds of hours of interviews and embedded research with the Governance Team charged with researching, planning, and building this new institution.
The creation of the Oversight Board and its aims are a novel articulation of internet governance. This Feature illuminates the future implications of the new institution for global freedom of expression. Using the lens of adjudication, it analyzes what the Board is, what the Board means to users, and what the Board means for industry and governments. Ultimately, the Feature concludes that the Facebook Oversight Board has great potential to set new precedent for user participation in private platforms’ governance and a user right to procedure in content moderation.