What Is the Facebook Oversight Board?

The board will tell Facebook to remove the ban, or to keep it. The ruling may also come with more nuance. The board could say that the ban was appropriate at the time but is no longer necessary, or that the ban was the wrong decision from the start.

The company then has seven days to put the board’s ruling into effect.

How does the board make its decision?

The board takes cases that are referred by Facebook or the public. The panel then selects five members to first deliberate on each case, with one based in the home country represented by the case.

The members meet to discuss the case and vet public comments. More than 9,000 comments were submitted on Trump’s account. The board extended its 90-day deadline on decisions for the Trump case because of the high volume of public comments. The board will base its decision on two main criteria: if Facebook’s ban on Mr. Trump followed the company’s community standards and adhered to human rights laws. When the smaller panel of board members reaches a majority, the decision is taken to the full board for a vote.

In the Trump case, Facebook also asked the board to give policy recommendations on how to handle the accounts of political leaders. The company doesn’t have to adopt the recommendations.

Is this decision the final say on Trump?

If Facebook follows its own rules, then yes. The company has said that all decisions from the oversight board are binding, and that even Mr. Zuckerberg couldn’t overturn the rulings. (Mr. Trump was also barred, permanently, from Twitter, where he had some 88 million followers.)

But there is no body that enforces this agreement between Facebook and the board. Facebook has rejected one recommendation by the board that dealt with the takedown of a Covid-19 post. The company says recommendations are different from rulings and are not binding.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/technology/What-Is-the-Facebook-Oversight-Board.html