The Facebook Oversight Board is calling for more transparency from the platform, according to new reporting from Axios. The Board made the recommendation in response to The Wall Street Journal's critical reporting of the Big Tech giant and the affect Instagram has on young women and girls.
As part of their investigation, The Journal slammed Facebook for its flawed practices that “cause harm.”
“Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands,” said The Journal.
Meanwhile, Facebook Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg argued that The Journal’s report deliberately mischaracterized the platform.
“The @WSJ series raises serious & complex issues,” he tweeted with a link to his statement from Facebook. “It's absolutely legitimate for Facebook to be held to account. But it contains deliberate mischaracterizations of what we are trying to do & confers egregiously false motives to our leadership & employees.”
Meanwhile, the Oversight Board said it will “address concerns” with Facebook about decision-making, presumably referring to its content moderation decisions.
According to Axios, the Board will "meet with the company to address concerns around inconsistencies in its decision-making and whether the company has been fully forthcoming in its responses on cross-check and whitelisting."
The Board then referenced its “warning” about banning former President Donald Trump.
"At the Oversight Board, we have been asking questions about cross-check for some time,” the Board said. “In our decision concerning former US President Donald Trump’s accounts, we warned that a lack of clear public information on cross-check and Facebook’s ‘newsworthiness exception’ could contribute to perceptions that Facebook is unduly influenced by political and commercial considerations."
At the time, the Board suggested: “Facebook should use less restrictive measures to address potentially harmful speech and protect the rights of others before resorting to content removal and account restriction.”
It went on to bizarrely call for more censorship, however, stating that Facebook should create “effective mechanisms to avoid amplifying speech that poses risks of imminent violence, discrimination, or other lawless action, where possible and proportionate, rather than banning the speech outright.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact the Facebook Oversight Board on Twitter or Facebook and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment and provide clarity on “hate speech.” If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
