The company, meaning its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, will act in its best interests as a business. “The immediate holding of our decision is binding and I do think that they are going to set precedent.” He added, “The analogy to the Supreme Court is not bad.”īut Facebook is no public entity and the board’s policy rulings have no legal standing beyond co-opting the language of the legal system. Michael McConnell, another co-chair and a Stanford Law School professor, said Facebook was “open to the suggestions of the board” in an interview. “Anyone who is concerned about Facebook’s excessive concentration of power should welcome the oversight board clearly telling Facebook that they cannot invent new unwritten rules when it suits them,” she said in a call with media outlets. Helle Thorning-Schmidt, an oversight board co-chair and former prime minister of Demark, sought to bolster the body’s importance. Its remit is only to decide whether specific posts should remain on the site or be removed. Its members may be deliberative, earnest and thoughtful, but the oversight board cannot compel Facebook to make underlying policy changes nor set meaningful precedent about moderation.
The whole farce highlights the fatuousness of having a quasi-court assist a multinational corporation in making business decisions.
Yet when presented with its most consequential issue - whether to uphold the site’s indefinite suspension of Donald Trump - the board on Wednesday said Facebook should make the ultimate decision. A year ago, Facebook introduced an oversight board that it said would help it answer difficult moderation questions - that is, who is allowed to use the social media site to amplify his voice and who is not.
0 kommentar(er)
