As the great philosopher Oncle Ben puts it in Spider-Man, "great powers imply great responsibilities". And while Facebook's powers are immense, the company decided, after years of controversy, to entrust the ultimate responsibility for moderation to a council of wise men. This independent body will be responsible for deciding on the most sensitive content relating to freedom of expression, harassment or hatred. On Wednesday, Facebook revealed the identity of the first 20 members of this Supreme Court, which will eventually count 40. Faced with more than 2.5 billion network users, their task promises to be immense.
A Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a former Danish Prime Minister, a former Guardian boss, rights professors… Facebook placed her counsel on the sign of diversity and equality, with personalities representing a wide range countries, languages and horizons: there are five people for North America, four for Europe, three for Asia-Pacific, and two for Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and South Asia. Facebook chose the four founding members, who recruited the other 16.
High level resumes
Facebook undertakes to make public all the decisions taken by its supervisory board "while protecting the identity and privacy of the people involved". The powerful network, on the other hand, will not be able to dismiss the members or staff of the council, which will rely on a fund of $ 130 million. And the board will have absolute authority: Mark Zuckerberg will not be able to go against his decisions.
"We are essentially building a new governance model for the platform," said former Prime Minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt, co-chair with three other members including Catalina Botero Marino, Colombian lawyer and former special rapporteur for freedom of expression at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Among other members, we also find the 2011 Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize winner Kolkata Abdel-Salam Karman, a journalist, activist and politician engaged in the defense of women's rights, or the Franco-Cameroonian lawyer Julie Owono, director of the NGO Internet without borders.
Among the men, Andras Sajo, former Hungarian judge and vice-president of the European Court of Human Rights, and Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of the British daily newspaper The Guardian , who gave worldwide visibility to the group after the revelations whistleblower Edward Snowden. Rusbridger is arguably one of the most critical members of Facebook, saying the network "gives a voice to those who don't have one, but is also a catalyst for the dark side." "
"Not the Internet police"
Debate on nudity, harassment, incitement to hatred or genocide (Facebook in particular slow to react to the propaganda, on its site, of the Burmese army against the Rohingya minority) ... The controversies have not stopped in recent years. While artificial intelligence still has a hard time deciding on social issues, Facebook relies on tens of thousands of human moderators who work in hellish conditions.
Former US federal judge Michael McConnell, also co-chair, has already indicated that the board will not be able to deal with all disputes as the volume is large. Priority will be given to cases which could set precedents, those which affect a large number of users or which may have an effect on public discourse. "We may have to select a few flowers, or maybe they are weeds, from a field of possibilities," he pictured. "We are not the Internet police," he said, however. "We must not see ourselves as a rapid intervention team (...) Our job is to examine the calls, to provide a second deliberative look after the fact," he added.
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