
Facebook's ‘oversight board’ is proof that it wants to be regulated by itself - caution
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/16/facebooks-oversight-board-is-proof-that-it-wants-to-be-regulated-by-itself
======
iamthemonster
I work in a completely different industry, but it is a well-known principle
that if you can show the regulator that you're regulating yourself effectively
they'll leave you the fuck alone. As soon as a fuckup becomes public, the
regulator will start delving into every detail of your fuckups (of which you
have many). It costs money and ties up valuable resources to respond to the
regulator when they start getting stuck into details, so it always pays
dividends to maintain an outward display of effective self-regulation.

It's in every large company's interests to maintain a steady stream of
propaganda to show just how splendid they are at regulating themselves.

~~~
rmrfstar
Unfortunately NDA's and raw intimidation suppress a lot of horrific abuses.
I'm sure these abound at Facebook, which has had at least one workplace
suicide this year. Some families don't have the resources to investigate, the
way this victim's did [1].

I don't mean to dump on Facebook, this is just one of those rare cases where
it came out into the sunlight.

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/facebook-employee-suicide-
be...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/facebook-employee-suicide-being-
investigated-by-law-firm-for-family.html)

------
pesenti
I am curious, given the international nature of Facebook which makes it hard
to rely on country authorities to settle content moderation disputes: what
would be a better alternative? (Disclaimer: I work at FB)

~~~
Hokusai
> what would be a better alternative?

None. I see too often the argument 'it's difficult for company X to follow the
law, so how should countries change the law to fit the company needs?'.

I have worked for decades in regulated markets. It sucks to have a dozen
implementations to fit each regulation and a thousand similar but slightly
different reports. But, we always follow the law, we do what local regulators
ask us to do, we filter, or change the content to fit the local government
decisions.

Facebook argument is ‘we do not want to follow local laws because that
increases cost and makes some business practices illegal in parts of the
world. That mindset is destructive and fights agains society needs just to get
higher profit.

If you work for Facebook, ask the company to look for experienced companies in
regulated markets. And I do not mean just to hire lobbyists but to create a
technical infrastructure that allows to follow the rule of law in all
countries where it operates. To just lobby for more political power only makes
Facebook mindset worse.

~~~
javagram
> Facebook argument is ‘we do not want to follow local laws because that
> increases cost and makes some business practices illegal in parts of the
> world. That mindset is destructive and fights agains society needs just to
> get higher profit.

I don’t think this is their argument at all.

Facebook regulates and removes far more content than required by law.

Under the US 1st Amendment almost everything offensive, racist, bad,
pornographic, etc is legal. Facebook still removes quite a lot of legal
content from their posts and their content moderators get PTSD from having to
look at content which may be legal.

I think Facebook’s real issue is that they know they and their user base want
them to be stricter than the law requires, but where should those standards
fall?

~~~
DSingularity
The standards should fall wherever society wants them. If Facebook is upset
about that, they can exit the markets.

~~~
bzb3
That means going for the lowest denominator.

~~~
paulryanrogers
If they want to profit from the whole of society then they'll have to strike a
balance that minimizes offences which will drive away too many users or
attract too many regulators.

------
nelsonic
Covered by Wired in more detail last week:
[https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-and-the-folly-of-
self-r...](https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-and-the-folly-of-self-
regulation)

designed to "move slowly and keep things intact."

------
pwdisswordfish2
"Facebook is not a public body: it's a powerful and rich global corporation
with no democratic legitimacy"

Facebook is a website. That is all. It does not even produce content, let
alone run a business in the real world (e.g., Amazon).

It is a remarkable phenomenon, no doubt, but it is just a website, with
billions of template pages each filled in with data from users.

They do not do anything else at Facebook except maintain a website and conduct
surveillance. That's it.

If someone tomorrow started a website and offered to give out free web pages
(i.e., not a paid blogging patform, not Wix, etc.) without any surveillance or
ads/promotions, would you sign up?

There will always be naysayers whenever we share thoughts of the
possibilities.

Surely, if someone told you in 2003 that he/she was going to start a website
that would sign up billions of users who would submit photos of themselves and
personal information to be published, most of you would dismiss the idea as
impossible. There was no such thing as a single public website with _billions_
of pages of personal information voluntarily submitted.

The same goes for Wikipedia. What if someone told you in 2001 they were going
to start a website and grow it to 53 million pages? No doubt, naysaysers would
have asked "How do you make money?"

It is a website. Anyone can start one. Of course, Facebook is not fond of this
reality hence the notion of "platform". It is still a website.

The fact that anyone can start a website is the only democratic aspect of the
www.

~~~
edmundsauto
You are very dismissive of Facebook, yet I'm not sure what insight should be
gleaned from this simplification. I'm open to understanding your point, but it
sounds like your point is that Facebook is a website. And I'm not sure what
insight that simplification allows me to unlock.

Beyond being a website, it's also a mobile app, marketplace, communication
platform, hardware manufacturer, and cultural driver. (Not to mention that
it's a research organization, crisis response tool, ally to law enforcement,
etc.)

Would you similarly describe the US Constitution as a piece of paper? Such a
simplistic reduction doesn't seem all that useful to me.

~~~
pwdisswordfish2
You write: "Beyond being a website, ..." This is what the author is upset
about. He thinks Facebook believes it is something other than what it is,
e.g., it behaves as if it were a nation state.

When you continue: "it's also ...", you are simply referring to properties of
computers, software, the internet and the www. This has been debated on HN
before. Facebook is a website.

If Facebook were implemented in distributed Rolodexes and analog photo albums
I doubt you would be making such statements.

As for the implication that a website, e.g., Facebook, can be compared to the
US Consitution, this is the sort of thinking that sets off journalists and
yields rants like the OP. Whereas you refer to my comment as "simplistic
reduction", the author of the OP might refer to yours as "delusional
thinking".

The properties of the US Consitution that make it important do not come from
the fact it is a piece of paper or the conveniences that paper allows. They
come from what is written on the paper and the authors of the document.
Facebook does not produce content. It manages a website full of content
submitted by the public, then surveils and spams them to service advertisers
and promoters, for a fee.

The topic of the article is in fact how they purport to manage filtering that
content. Much of the content on Facebook is very low quality. A website with
billions of pages that takes submissions from the public, which has heaps of
low quality content. Surprising. This is precisely what the web was designed
for.

------
michaelcampbell
It reminds me of Bernie Madoff's brother being the Head of Compliance,
although even HE was allegedly kept in the dark about the Ponzi scheme.

------
nitwit005
Governments are forcing companies like Facebook to act as a judge and decide
what content is acceptable. Yes, I think that's stupid, but that's the
reality.

If you want some sort of democratic method for deciding this stuff, you need
to get governments to stop dumping the problems on companies.

------
mensetmanusman
Most people want to self regulate. Some people want to get enough political
power to regulate other people.

------
carapace
I think the linked article at the bottom is more interesting ("Naomi Klein:
How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic"
[https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-
how...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how-big-tech-
plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic) )

I think FB is creepy af personally, but this article doesn't do a good job of
reviewing the oversight board.

------
KaiserPro
There are a bunch of problems with facebook. The biggest first one is moral
cowardice.

The issue is this: the top brass genuinely believe that freedom of speech is
the best thing since sliced bread. However its not true freedom of speech, its
"freedom of expression" This means no murder pics, no nakedness or any combo
of the like. (Fair enough.)

They do not believe that they are able to adequately draw the line on
political ads. They do not think its right for facebook as a private company
to say that "lying" is not allowed.However if a political campaign was a
facebook group, they'd be shut down for violating the community standards. So,
instead of drawing up a set of principles, publishing them and then posting
every and all decisions. They want a law maker to set the rules.

The second problem is that they can't PR for shit.

Most of this stems from the inability for the business side (and quite a lot
of the engineering side) to communicate ideas in a simple short sentences
using a frame of reference that a normal person can understand.

Any kind of "here is my idea" in less than 140 chars is utterly beyond them.
an example is that they did some internal PR for "rooms" feature (aka zoom
killer). They had a TL;DR: that was something like 8 paragraphs. I still
didn't know what it was after reading about it. I knew they had to work with a
lot of other people though. It wasn't until someone outside of FB talked to me
about it that I realised what it was.

The Covid updates, which you'd hope would be really high signal to noise are
20 paragraphs of waffle. in the middle they have the actual important stuff
(when offices will close/open, procedural change for things). You have to sift
through mountains of mindfulness crap.

In conclusion, the only thing "evil" about facebook are the M&A lawyers. The
rest is just standard naivety, lack of moral leadership or just incompetence.

------
foolzcrow
Facebook needs to be regulated. They dont allow dissent or opinions that
oppose their own. While controlling the vast majority of social media.

------
crsmithdev
Another breathless, gasping story about the evils of FB / technology /
capitalism / <insert boogeyman here> from the Guardian, which has established
itself as the nexus for alarmist 'journalism'. The footer: "in the coming
year, and the results will define the country for a generation. These are
perilous times..." Doesn't sound much like a news outlet to me.

...then you read the piece and find out there's really very little content,
just links to other articles (some by the Guardian!). A lot of words on the
page that give the impression of something important, whereas in reality
they're just building on the narrative they've been selling.

~~~
adamsea
It's not like they have any context or history of gross, concerted efforts at
manipulating public opinion through Facebook and/or a lack of social
responsibility to draw upon. /s

~~~
creddit
But, like, here’s The Guardian having a go at a gross, concerted effort at
manipulating public opinion. Should we have a problem with that?

~~~
adamsea
Yeah a newspaper article is not the same as a covert social media influence
campaign :/. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

~~~
creddit
What gives the newspapers special status here that changes it from being
apples to apples? Why do newspapers get to use broadcast media to influence
the public but others aren’t allowed or at least should be looked at
negatively?

~~~
adamsea
A combination of law, culture, and the financial incentives of the respective
institutions.

------
raspasov
"Toxic business model" \- oh yeah?

Like the same one that pays the bills for theguardian.com?

(I just disabled my ad-block and saw scammy+nasty "feet" ads of some sort,
pretty sure those would not be allowed on FB.com)

(edit: fixed The Guardian link)

~~~
aww_dang
Love their self-righteous call to action in the footer.

"just when we need it the most. The Guardian’s honest, authoritative, fact-
based reporting has never mattered more. As we face the biggest challenge of
our lifetimes, we’ll remain with you, so we can all better understand and
combat the crisis. But at this crucial moment, news organisations are facing
an existential threat. With advertising revenues plummeting, we risk losing a
major source of our funding. More than ever before, we need your support to
help fill the gap."

According to The Guardian, The Guardian is honest, authoritative and fact-
based.

Easy enough to not use the site if I don't like it. The same applies for FB.
Apparently non-violent opt-out isn't enough for The Guardian though. The
Guardian (honest, authoritative) proposes that the state should guard us all
from FB and their "supreme leader" Zuckerberg.

At what point do the principles of private property and free speech no longer
apply to the websites we create?

~~~
makomk
Speaking of companies that want to regulate themselves, The Guardian is pretty
much the only UK publication that's refused to join the industry-wide,
nominally independent press regulator IPSO, which means that they're
effectively the only one who are not held to any external standards regarding
the honesty and factual accuracy of their reporting. Which is more than a
little ironic in this context. They've also been using their opinion section
to undermine IPSO for such offences as not being aggressive enough in helping
their preferred political party send different messages to its members and its
voters by forcing other publications to take down articles revealing to the
everyone else what they've been telling their members. (Remember how we were
told Facebook ads were a danger to democracy because they'd allow politicians
to promote different, contradictory messages to different audiences?)

~~~
pmyteh
That's a slightly odd reading of the situation. The Guardian is a member of
the other regulatory body IMPRESS. The history of both organisations is a bit
complex, but the short version is that press self-regulation in the UK has
been something of a joke for the last hundred years or so, and IPSO is the
latest incarnation of that. The Leveson enquiry tried to set up regulators
with more teeth, which was faced by a heavy rearguard action by the
established press. This was either a principled attempt to head off
censorship, or a shameless attempt to protect profits, depending on which side
you were on.

IMPRESS is the Leveson-compliant regulator, IPSO the continuation of the old
PCC by another name. Most newspapers went with IPSO, The Guardian didn't.

~~~
makomk
As far as I can tell The Guardian isn't a member of IMPRESS either - at least,
they're not on their list of members, and in fact none of the other major
newspapers are either. Their complaints page also doesn't mention membership
of any independent regulatory body - it suggests complaints are handled
entirely in house with no avenue of external appeal or complaint, which is my
understanding as well.

~~~
pmyteh
I apologise - you're quite right, I've misremembered. It looks like the
Financial Times hasn't joined IPSO or IMPRESS either.

------
LatteLazy
Their toilet systems also prove water is wet.

In all seriousness though, Facebook get a lot of shit but they are at least
trying to clean up their act. Legacy media has been vastly more corrupt and
treacherous for decades and shows no sign of any reform.

~~~
Traster
I'd love to see any evidence at all that Facebook is trying to clean up their
act.

~~~
LatteLazy
Lol, you’re commenting on an article criticising one such attempt!?

------
pacamara619
In other news: water wet, sky blue.

Jokes aside, not only Facebook but a lot of companies do that so it seems they
are proactive while they pretty much do nothing valuable and hope they don't
get regulated.

