Supreme Court focus on Facebook for content moderation

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival. In keeping with the spirit of the event, Zuckerberg brought some ideas. The big ones:

Facebook was right not to remove the doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Zuckerberg said it should have been flagged as misleading more quickly, but defended leaving it up. (I basically agree with him on this one.)

”This is a topic that can be very easily politicized,” Zuckerberg said. “People who don’t like the way that something was cut...will kind of argue that...it did not reflect the true intent or was misinformation. But we exist in a society...where we value and cherish free expression.”

But Facebook will treat deepfakes differently than other forms of misinformation. Zuckerberg said that the company’s policy team is currently considering it: “There is a question of whether deepfakes are actually just a completely different category of thing from normal false statements overall, and I think there is a very good case that they are.”

Facebook can’t protect against election interference alone. Zuckerberg was rightly critical of the US government’s extremely weak response to Russian attacks leading up to the 2016 election, saying:
”One of the mistakes that I worry about is that after 2016 when the government didn’t take any kind of counteraction. The signal that was sent to the world was that “O.K. We’re open for business.” Countries can try to do this stuff and our companies will try their best to try to limit it, but fundamentally, there isn’t going to be a major recourse from the American government. “Since then, we’ve seen increased activity from Iran and other countries, and we are very engaged in ramping up the defenses.”

On Tuesday, some reports had suggested that Zuckerberg was going to unveil a surprise new “constitution” for Facebook. Instead, on Thursday the company released a report detailing the progress it is making in building an independent oversight board for review. The board is connected to Zuckerberg’s big ideas â€" this is the body that could someday make a binding, independent evaluation of whether a video like the Pelosi fake could stay up on the site.

Since proposing the idea last year, Facebook has held six workshops around the world, which included more than 650 people from 88 countries. Among other things, the company has been conducting a kind of mock trial â€" having participants debate what to do with particular pieces of controversial content, as part of the work of developing a fair process for the board to implement in the future.

The idea remains to build a board of 40 people who will make content review decisions in small panels. But all of the details are up for discussion, and you can read about the infinitely branching debates the company is now having in the report itself. It makes for a surprisingly brisk read â€" for one thing, it goes out of its way to find and cite examples of people calling the board a stupid idea. And it’s much more entertaining than this halting, uncertain conversation between Zuckerberg and two prominent law professors, which attempts to bring a sense of history to the conversation but mostly just magnifies the historical weirdness of absolutely everything under discussion.
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