CANBERRA, Australia — Australia’s laws forcing Google and Facebook to pay for news are ready to take effect, though the laws’ architect said it will take time for the digital giants to strike media deals.
The Parliament on Thursday passed the final amendments to the so-called News Media Bargaining Code agreed between Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday.
In return for the changes, Facebook agreed to lift a ban on Australians accessing and sharing news.
Rod Sims, the competition regulator who drafted the code, said he was happy that the amended legislation would address the market imbalance between Australian news publishers and the two gateways to the internet.
“All signs are good,” Sims told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
“The purpose of the code is to address the market power that clearly Google and Facebook have. Google and Facebook need media, but they don’t need any particular media company, and that meant media companies couldn’t do commercial deals,” the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair added.
The rest of the laws had passed in Parliament earlier, so they can now be implemented.
Google has already struck deals with major Australian news businesses in recent weeks including News Corp. and Seven West Media.
Frydenberg said he was pleased to see progress by Google and more recently Facebook in reaching commercial deals with Australian news businesses.
But Country Press Australia, which represents 161 regional newspapers across the country, has raised concerns that tiny publications outside large cities might miss out.
Sims said he was not surprised that the platforms would strike deals with the large city businesses first.
“I don’t see any reason why anybody should doubt that all journalism will benefit,” Sims said.
“There things take time. Google and Facebook don’t have unlimited resources to go around talking to everybody. I think this has got a long way to play out,” he added.
Chris Moos, a lecturer at Oxford University’s Business School, said the latest amendments amounted to a “small victory” for Zuckerberg.
Moos said the legislation would likely result in small payouts for most Australian news publishers. But Facebook could again block Australian news if negotiations broke down.
The legislation was designed to curb the outsized bargaining power of Facebook and Google in their negotiations with Australian news providers. The digital giants would not be able to abuse their positions by making take-it-or-leave-it payment offers to news businesses for their journalism. Instead, in the case of a standoff, an arbitration panel would make a binding decision on a winning offer.
Frydenberg and Facebook confirmed that the two sides agreed to amendments to the proposed legislation. The changes would give digital platforms one month’s notice before they are formally designated under the code. That would give those involved more time to broker agreements before they are forced to enter binding arbitration arrangements.
A statement Tuesday by Campbell Brown, Facebook’s vice president for news partnerships, added that the deal allows the company to choose which publishers it will support, including small and local ones.
Frydenberg said his department will review the code within a year to “ensure it is delivering outcomes that are consistent with government’s policy intent.”
CANBERRA, Australia — Australia’s government announced on Tuesday that Facebook has agreed to lift its ban on Australians sharing news after a deal was struck on legislation that would make digital giants pay for journalism.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Facebook confirmed in statements that they had reached agreement on amendments to proposed legislation that would make the social network and Google pay for news that they feature.
Facebook blocked Australian users from accessing and sharing news last week after the House of Representatives passed the draft law late Wednesday.
The Senate will debate amended legislation on Tuesday.
“The government has been advised by Facebook that it intends to restore Australian news pages in the coming days,” Frydenberg and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said in a statement.
(CANBERRA, Australia) — Facebook announced Thursday it has blocked Australians from viewing and sharing news on the platform because of proposed laws in the country to make digital giants pay for journalism.
Australian publishers can continue to publish news content on Facebook, but links and posts can’t be viewed or shared by Australian audiences, the U.S.-based company said in a statement.
Australian users cannot share Australian or international news.
International users outside Australia also cannot share Australian news.
“The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content,” Facebook regional managing director William Easton said.
“It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia. With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter,” Easton added.
The announcement comes a day after Treasurer Josh Frydenberg described as “very promising” negotiations between Facebook and Google with Australian media companies.
Frydenberg said after weekend talks with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google, he was convinced that the platforms “do want to enter into these commercial arrangements.”
Frydenberg said he had had a “a constructive discussion” with Zuckerberg after Facebook blocked Australian news.
“He raised a few remaining issues with the Government’s news media bargaining code and we agreed to continue our conversation to try to find a pathway forward,” Frydenberg tweeted.
But communications Minister Paul Fletcher said the government would not back down on its legislative agenda.
“This announcement from Facebook, if they were to maintain this position, of course would call into question the credibility of the platform in terms of the news on it,” Fletcher told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
“Effectively Facebook is saying to Australians information that you see on our platforms does not come from organizations that have editorial policies or fact-checking processes or journalists who are paid to do the work they do,” Fletcher added.
The Australian Parliament is debating proposed laws that would make the two platforms strike deals to pay for Australian news.
The Senate will consider the draft laws after they were passed by the House of Representatives late Wednesday.
Both platforms have condemned the proposed laws an unworkable. Google has also threatened to remove its search engine from the country.
But Google is striking pay deals with Australian news media companies under its own News Showcase model.
Seven West Media on Monday became the largest Australian news media business to strike a deal with Google to pay for journalism.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has since announced a wide-ranging deal.
Rival Nine Entertainment is reportedly close to its own pact and ABC is also in negotiations.
News plays a larger part in Google’s business model than it does in Facebook’s.
Easton said the public would ask why the platforms were responding differently to the proposed law that would create an arbitration panel to set a price for news in cases where the platforms and news businesses failed to agree.
“The answer is because our platforms have fundamentally different relationships with news,” Easton said.
Peter Lewis, director of the Australia Institute’s Center for Responsible Technology think tank, said Facebook’s decision “will make it a weaker social network.”
“Facebook actions mean the company’s failures in privacy, disinformation, and data protection will require a bigger push for stronger government regulation,” Lewis said. “Without fact-based news to anchor it, Facebook will become little more than cute cats and conspiracy theories.”
Users of red-hot social media platform Clubhouse in China said they were unable to use the app on Monday, after an explosion of discussions over the weekend on taboo topics from Taiwan to Xinjiang.
Reports of users being unable to use the invite-only, audio-based app appeared on other social-media platforms such as Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat and Sina Corp.’s microblogging platform Weibo. On Twitter, which is blocked in China, users claiming to be in the country posted screenshots of Clubhouse’s home screen saying that an error had occurred and that a secure connection to the server could not be made.
Clubhouse had erupted among Chinese users over the weekend, with thousands joining discussions on contentious subjects undisturbed by Beijing’s censors.
On the app, where users host informal conversations, Chinese-speaking communities from around the world gathered to discuss China-Taiwan relations and the prospects of unification, and to share their knowledge and experience of Beijing’s crackdown on Muslim Uighurs in the far west region of Xinjiang.
Until mainland-based users began experiencing technical difficulties, Clubhouse was gaining traction in mainland China. The hashtag #Clubhouse attracted more than 51 million views on Weibo, while the question “Why Clubhouse is so popular” generated hundreds of answers on Zhihu, a Chinese Q&A site. The surge in interest also created a new business, as dozens of stores on Alibaba’s online marketplaces appeared to be selling invitation codes to the app for as much as 288 yuan ($44.60) each.
The company did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment.
In recent months, several former Bachelor cast members have used their Instagram accounts to promote the fertility awareness app Natural Cycles as a method of contraception. The celebrities touting the app to their millions of followers have sent up red flags to health experts. Some say the app and its messaging presents a simplified, and possibly misleading, understanding of how its users can avoid getting pregnant.
Natural Cycles is a popular fertility-tracking app that relies on an algorithm that calculates the days of the month a woman is likely to be fertile based on basal body temperature readings and menstrual cycle data. It gives users a thermometer for daily temperature checks and claims to indicate when the user is ovulating and should either abstain from sex or use protection to prevent pregnancy. In 2018, it became the first app to be cleared for marketing as a contraceptive by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) after being certified as a contraceptive in the European Union in 2017. While there’s nothing out of the ordinary about reality TV influencers advertising products on their social media accounts, these particular posts provide an incomplete—and therefore, potentially harmful—picture of how effective fertility awareness methods (FAMs) are at preventing pregnancy.
In the caption of a Jan. 25 Instagram post promoting Natural Cycles, former Bachelor and Bachelor in Paradise contestant Tia Booth wrote that she began using the app as an alternative contraception method to hormonal birth control.
“When I got off [birth control pills] I didn’t want to take any synthetic hormones so was tracking my cycle by counting days on my calendar through a period tracker, which ummm is not reliable,” the post reads. “Thankfully, my friend told me about [Natural Cycles], the first and only FDA cleared birth control app, and I’ve been using it ever since.”
At least six Bachelor Nation alums have posted ads for Natural Cycles over the past few months, promoting the app to over 4 million collective followers. However, the ads do not say that FAMs are widely considered one of the least effective contraception methods. Obtaining accurate basal body temperature readings isn’t as simple as these Instagram posts make it seem, says Dr. Katherine Varda Schwab, an OB/GYN in Seattle. And an incorrect reading could potentially mislead users into thinking they’re not ovulating.
“Taking your basal body temperature should be done before you move out of bed in the morning. And depending on how well you wake up, getting that accurate reading is really difficult and usually takes months of practice, because you literally have to do it before you get up to pee or move your body,” Schwab says. “So you have to reach over and take your temperature and then have the wherewithal to record it as well. It’s difficult for most people to do.”
Schedule variations like sleeping during the day or waking up later or earlier than you normally do can also affect your basal body temperature, Dr. Jennifer Chin, a complex family planning fellow completing a rotation at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, says. “When you’re looking at fluctuations as small as 0.2 degrees, if you’re relying on that to tell you when you’re ovulating, some of these factors can definitely affect your temperature in that range.”
Natural Cycles claims to be 98% effective with perfect use and 93% effective with typical use. But while FAMs like Natural Cycles can be a safe way to prevent pregnancy for some people, they’re not foolproof.
“To use FAMs effectively you need to be very knowledgeable about your menstrual cycle, when you’re ovulating, and when you’re fertile, so that you understand when it’s safer to have sex without risking pregnancy,” Planned Parenthood says. “It’s important to know that FAMs can be inconvenient and difficult to use correctly, so they’re less effective than other types of birth control, including IUDs, the implant, or permanent birth control — all more than 99 percent effective…”
“This is one little cog in the wheel in the range of things that people can use for contraception. And it feels good for a lot of people to be like, ‘Yes, I want to follow my natural cycle,'” Schwab says. “But without adequately talking about the risk of getting pregnant and being able to fully counsel somebody on what the comparative success rates [for other contraceptive methods are], I think [these influencers] are doing a disservice to the millions of people that they have influence over.”
FAMs are also usually low to no cost—although Natural Cycles costs $89.99 per year—have no side effects and can help you learn about your body and fertility.
“[FAMs] really allow the patient to become more aware of her own menstrual cycle and have a much greater awareness of her own body and her own fertility in a way that does not necessarily happen if she’s on some type of prescribed contraception,” adds Chin.
This certainly isn’t the first time that Bachelor contestants have used Instagram to advertise controversial products. With Vulture reporting in 2015 that a reality TV star with 200,000-500,000 Instagram followers could make anywhere between $3,000-$7,000 for a single promotional post, social-media endorsement deals often go hand-in-hand with a run on one of the franchise’s shows.
“Overnight you have this huge following, so all these brands are like, ‘Here, do you want to work with us?’” Kaitlyn Bristowe, the lead on Season 11 of The Bachelorette, told The Cut in 2017. “So you get offers to do the Flat Tummy Tea and the teeth whitening and all that. For somebody who has worked a regular job before, you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re going to pay me to do that? Glorious.’”
As name-dropped by Bristowe, Flat Tummy Co. is one brand in particular that has come under fire in recent years for using Instagram influencers like the Bachelor stars and Kardashians to shill questionable diet products like detox teas, appetite suppressant lollipops and meal-replacement shakes.
Eating disorders are a very real issue for a lot of young people and to see Kim Kardashian actively encouraging her fans to develop an unhealthy relationship with food is terrifying and gravely concerning. pic.twitter.com/hhFYBbm8hL
But while these advertising tactics aren’t new, Natural Cycles presents a new set of issues. As Chin says, it takes a very specific patient to be a good candidate to use FAMs as contraception.
“You really need to be someone who has regular menstrual cycles that are predictable. And this requires a lot of homework and a lot of preparation,” she says. “Typically, for someone who’s considering a fertility awareness method, we recommend tracking your cycle for at least three cycles. To be a good candidate, you need to be someone who, for a consistent three months, are able to predict when you will ovulate and when you will have your menses in a very standard fashion.”
For people who have irregular periods, using FAMs as contraception can pose a high risk of unintended pregnancy, Chin says.
“If you’re someone who has irregular menses, or sometimes skips periods every other month, or has longer or shorter cycles, then this can make tracking your periods very difficult,” she says. “For people who don’t take the time to do the necessary three months or more of tracking, it can put you at very high risk for an unintended pregnancy, because you might be ovulating and not know and have intercourse during your fertile period.”
Fertility awareness apps also don’t factor in extenuating circumstances that might affect your cycle, and therefore the efficacy of the app as contraception, Chin adds.
“An app does not take into account travel that you might be doing, stress from working night shifts, stress from childcare, stress from being in a COVID-19 pandemic, stress from an argument that you had at work, and all of those things can significantly affect your cycle,” she says. “These aren’t things that would necessarily be tracked in a fertility awareness method application, and a particular stress could make the fertility awareness method unsuccessful.”
Twitter blocked access to accounts associated with farmers protesting against the Indian government on Monday, in a localized blackout of some 250 accounts and tweets.
The blocks, which only applied for viewers based in India, came after the Indian government hit Twitter with a legal demand.
One thing many of the accounts appeared to have in common: they had shared content that criticized the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) amid anongoing protest movement by farmers, which has morphed into a wider threat to the government’s authority. Many of the blocked accounts had also used the false hashtag “ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide,” a reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
After the blockages drewwidespreadcondemnationonline, Twitter said it had unblocked all the accounts late on Monday. According to Twitter, company representatives had met with Indian government officials to convey that the tweets constituted free speech and are newsworthy.
The blocks came days after peaceful protests in Delhi by farmers unhappy with government agricultural reforms turned violent for the first time on Jan. 26. Farmers used tractors to tear down police barricades, and videos of police attacking protesting farmers circulated on social media. At least one person was killed. A journalist reporting on the violence, Mandeep Punia, was also arrested at a protest site and charged with obstructing police, according to the IndianExpress.
Among the users blocked by Twitter on Monday were Kisan Ekta Morcha (Farmers’ Unity Front), an account with 171,000 followers that represented the protesting farmers; Tractor to Twitter, another account with more than 42,000 followers that describes itself as “supporting protesting farmers on social media”; and MD Salim, a former lawmaker. Also blocked wasTheCaravan, a highly-respected investigative magazine that often publishes content critical of India’s Hindu nationalist government.
“This is a continuation of a larger degree of censorship which is taking place around the farmers’ protests in India,” Apar Gupta, the executive director of India’s Internet Freedom Foundation, tells TIME. “It shows that the government wants to control the narrative of electronic and digital media.”
The Indian government’s Ministry of Electronics and IT submitted a list of around 250 accounts and tweets that had allegedly used the “ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide” hashtag to Twitter, accusing the accounts of “making fake, intimidatory and provocative tweets,” according to a government memo shared with Indian journalists and seen by TIME. “Incitement to genocide is a grave threat to public order and therefore the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MEITY) ordered for blocking of these Twitter accounts and tweets,” the memo said. (The Indian government did not respond to requests for comment.)
“Many countries have laws that may apply to tweets and/or Twitter account content,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement before the accounts were restored on Monday, in response to a list of questions from TIME. “In our continuing effort to make our services available to people everywhere, if we receive a properly scoped request from an authorized entity, it may be necessary to withhold access to certain content in a particular country from time to time.” Even after Twitter said the tweets and accounts were reinstated, the company said the government’s legal demand was valid.
The legal demand from the Indian government put Twitter, which has employees based in the country, in a difficult position. On one hand, companies must comply with local laws in jurisdictions where they operate. But in many countries, authoritarian leaders use laws selectively to intimidate opposition voices, sometimes forcing tech companies that normally preach the value of free speech to play censor instead.
As anti-governmentprotest movementshave swelled in India over the last 14 months, the Indian government has increasingly sent legal demands to Twitter demanding content takedowns, according to Twitter’s most recenttransparency report. Between January and June 2020, the most recent period for which data are available, Twitter received 2,768 legal demands to remove content in India—a more than 274% increase on the previous six months. Twitter complied with 13.8% of those requests, according to the report. India sends the fifth-highest number of takedown requests to Twitter of any country, the report says. (Japan, Russia, South Korea and Turkey are the top four.) India also led the world in government-targeted Internet shutdowns in 2020, with blockages (often targeted at sites of protest or insurgency) lasting nearly 9,000 hours and costing the economy an estimated $2.7 billion, according toresearchby Top10VPN.
Sanjeev Verma—Hindustan Times/Getty ImagesDemonstrators are tear-gassed during the farmers’ tractor rally on January 26, 2021 in New Delhi, India.
And especially in India, a country with more than 500 million Internet users, (and more logging on for the first time every day,) the business incentives for social media companies to keep the government on-side are strong. Still, despite facing pressure from some authoritarian governments, social media companies also have an international reputation to protect. Twitter’s statement to TIME on Monday went on: “Transparency is vital to protecting freedom of expression.”
Yet Twitter would not respond on the record to questions about the detail of the legal requests it received in relation to the accounts that were blocked on Monday. According to India’s Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), the law used by the Indian government calling on Twitter to block the tweets “prevent intermediaries like Twitter from disclosing any information about blocking of an account or tweet.”
“The confidentiality requirement…creates a bizarre situation where citizens have the right to challenge blocking of online content but they are unable to do so because they don’t have access to these legal orders.” the IFFsaid.
In addition, the laws place a high burden on tech companies to comply with government orders. “Twitter is not able to resist these demands from the government under existing legal regulations,” says Gupta, the IFF director. “If they do resist it, under theexisting legal powers, they would arguably be liable for criminal prosecution under an offense for which jail terms on conviction extend towards seven years.”
At the same time as India’s ruling BJP mobilizes national law to apparently crack down on critics’ use of Twitter, the party and its supporters have long themselves used social media platforms as key tools for disseminating disinformation, mounting harassment campaigns, and spreading hate speech. According to the 2016 bookI am a Trollby Swati Chaturvedi, disinformation and harassment campaigns are coordinated by senior party officials who share talking points with vocal supporters, who then tweet them out on their personal accounts.
In April 2020, as COVID-19 began spreading in India, thehashtag “CoronaJihad” trended on Twitter, appearing at least 165 million times on the site in a matter of days, according to data shared with TIME by the NGO Equality Labs. The hashtag was part of a disinformation campaign seeking to blame Muslims for the spread of COVID-19 in India. Twitter said it was “committed to protect and serve the public conversation” at the time, and began removing tweets. But the Indian government took no legal action against the accounts spreading the conspiracy theory.
The end of April will be a turning point for former President Donald Trump. That’s when he will learn whether he can regain control of his Facebook and Instagram accounts—and direct access to nearly 60 million followers on two of the world’s largest social media platforms.
It’s not publicly elected officials who will make this call, nor a judge, nor even Facebook itself. Instead, it will be the 20 members of theFacebook Oversight Board, a little-known panel of lawyers, journalists and former political leaders from 18 different countries that Facebook established less than one year ago.
Trump’s accounts have beensuspendedsince Jan. 7—the day after he incited a violent mob of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol building in Washington. While Twitter permanently banned Trump, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook’s suspension (and Instagram’s) would last indefinitely, and at least until the end of Trump’s presidency. The news landed into polarized Americans’ feeds with predictable divisiveness: many said the decision had come too late; others—and not just supporters of the former President—derided it as unconscionable censorship. Then, the day after Trump left the White House, Facebook announced it was asking its newly created Oversight Board to decide whether to reinstate the 45th U.S. President.
The Oversight Board’s ruling on the Trump case will be a defining moment for Facebook, perhaps the biggest test yet of whether the company’s attempts to regulate itself can gain legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary people and lawmakers around the world. The decision will be watched particularly closely in the U.S. and E.U., where legislativeefforts to rein in Big Techare on the cards. “The ambition for the Oversight Board is for it to have a quasi-judicial role, and the key thing about any judicial institution is it has to have legitimacy to earn deference,” says Daniel Weitzner, the director of MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative. “Over time, if this body makes decisions that are seen as reasonable, and Facebook follows them, I think they’ll become a part of the landscape.”
The question of Trump’s continued access to Facebook is especially thorny for the company, given the polarized political landscape. “We’re dealing with a significant proportion of registered Republicans who question the legitimacy of the Biden Administration,” says Weitzner, who served in the Obama White House. “They’re not going to accept the Facebook Oversight Board’s legitimacy if they don’t like the result.”
And in coming to its ruling on whether to uphold Trump’s suspension, the OversightBoard could also open the door to an even bigger decision than Trump’s future on the platform: whether Facebook should change its rules to allow other elected politicians to be banned. Up until now, that has been rare, thanks to an exemption that allows political leaders to break the rules if Facebook judges that the newsworthiness of a statement outweighs the risk of physical harm.
In referring Trump’s case to the Oversight Board, Facebook also asked for “policy recommendations” about how the company should deal with “suspensions when the user is a political leader.” But an Oversight Board spokesperson told TIME that any decision would not be binding—leaving the final say up to Facebook alone.
Michaela Handrek-Rehle—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesMark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Inc., at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, on Feb. 15, 2020.
Why Facebook created the Oversight Board
For years, Facebook hassaid it’s uncomfortablethat it alone has the power to grant or deny access to one of the world’s information superhighways—and the attention that those kinds of decisions inevitably bring.
“I think everyone would benefit from greater clarity on how local governments expect content moderation to work in their countries,” Zuckerberg wrote in 2018. But in lots of places, government rules still aren’t tailored to legally enforce the removal of online threats, especially in countries like the U.S. where free speech is prized. “Those norms don’t exist, and in the meantime we can’t duck making decisions in real time,” Facebook’s vice president for global affairs, Nick Clegg, told the New YorkTimeson Monday. (Facebook said Clegg was unavailable for an interview for this story.)
“Platforms have never wanted to be in a position of having to make controversial decisions,” says Weitzner, who in the 1990s was involved in drafting Section 230, the federal law that defines how platforms are held accountable for content. “They actually want to be told what to do.”
In 2018, Zuckerberg floated plans to set up a body that would be a kind of Supreme Court overseeing Facebook’s rules, staffed by an independent body of experts. In May 2020, that body came to life in the form of the Facebook Oversight Board. A co-chair,Helle Thorning-Schmidt, is a former Prime Minister of Denmark. Among the Board’s members areTawakkol Karman, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning Yemeni activist, and Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of Britain’sGuardiannewspaper. The Board is funded by a $130 million trust, set up by Facebook but legally independent, and pays each of its members a six figure sum,according to the New YorkTimes. Facebook says its rulings will be both binding and transparent.
What the Oversight Board is doing
On Thursday, the Oversight Board announced rulings on its first five cases—a smattering of disputes about Facebook takedowns of controversial posts. In a sign that its members were prepared to overrule their progenitor, the Board overturned Facebook’s original decisions in four of the five cases, saying in a statement that its rulings “demonstrate our commitment to holding Facebook to account.” Facebook duly said it would enforce the decisions.
The Oversight Board’s public statement also hints at the bigger decision to come, on Trump. “Recent events in the United States and around the world have highlighted the enormous impact that content decisions taken by internet services have on human rights and free expression,” it said. The controversies created by those decisions, it went on, “draw attention to the value of independent oversight of the most consequential decisions by companies such as Facebook.”
There are early signs that the board’s members lean toward more permissive views on free speech—which could be a good omen for the former President. One of the five rulings the Oversight Board announced on Thursday overturned Facebook’s decision to take down an anti-Muslim post from Myanmar, where Facebook acknowledged in 2018 that it did not do enough to stop genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority the previous year.
The post that the Board called on Facebook to reinstate included images of a dead Muslim child and a caption stating that “there is something wrong with Muslims (or Muslim men) psychologically or with their mindset,” according to a summary of the case released by the Board. The post, which Facebook had removed for violating its hate speech policies, also “seems to imply the child may have grown up to be an extremist,” the Board’s summary said. But the Board overturned Facebook’s decision to remove the post, concluding that “while the post might be considered offensive, it did not reach the level of hate speech.”
The decision worried some activists. “Facebook’s Oversight Board bent over backwards to excuse hate in Myanmar—a county where Facebook has been complicit in a genocide against Muslims,” a spokesperson for the U.S.-based NGO Muslim Advocates said in a statement. “It is clear that the Oversight Board is here to launder responsibility for Zuckerberg and [Facebook COO] Sheryl Sandberg. Instead of taking meaningful action to curb dangerous hate speech on the platform, Facebook punted responsibility to a third party board that used laughable technicalities to protect anti-Muslim hate content that contributes to genocide.”
Photo-illustration by Lon Tweeten for TIME; Getty images
How Facebook’s critics are responding
To many critics of Facebook, the Oversight Board is a distraction from the real issues plaguing the company: misinformation at scale, hate speech, organized violence, and the ways Facebook’s algorithms amplify those kinds of content. One group of critics has set up an alternative panel of experts, called the Real Facebook Oversight Board, and issued a statement on Thursday rubbishing the Board’s first set of decisions. “This is a PR effort that obfuscates the urgent issues that Facebook continually fails to address: the continued proliferation of hate speech and disinformation on their platforms,” the statement said.
For critics, the Oversight Board is a spectacle aimed at preserving the broad status quo: taking controversial decisions on content out of Facebook’s hands, while avoiding harder questions that might harm Facebook’s business model, like tweaking its algorithms to reduce the rapid spread of harmful content. “I think any self-regulatory effort, because that’s essentially what this is, will always fall short of a firmly rule-of-law-anchored process,” saysMarietje Schaake, the international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center,who sits on the Real Facebook Oversight Board. “I just hope it doesn’t distract American lawmakers.”
Among the alternative board’s criticisms: the fact members of the Oversight Board were “hand-picked” by Facebook. (Facebook maintains that the Board is financially and operationally independent.) “They’re independent thinkers, but the process doesn’t set them up to be truly independent,” says Schaake. “The setup has a lot of baked-in limitations.”
One of those limitations, according to Schaake, is the Board’s jurisdiction. Currently, it can only pass rulings on whether certain posts should have been taken down by Facebook — not rule on posts that are allowed to remain online. It also cannot issue rulings on Facebook’s amplification algorithms, which many researchers say are instrumental in spreading and promoting divisive content online, or entire Facebook groups, which are akey vectorfor the rapid spread of harmful content like misinformation and incitement to violence. The Oversight Board says it hopes its remitwill soon expandto cover posts that remain on the site, not just ones Facebook has already taken down.
Given these limitations, the headline-grabbing matter of Trump’s account is little more than a distraction, critics say. “The fact that Donald Trump is unable to express himself on Facebook is less important than the fact that all of his followers and supporters continue to express themselves on Facebook,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, who is not affiliated with the alternative board. “The phenomenon that we should be worried about is the aggregate message that undermines democracy, divides societies, spreads hatred. That continues, and Facebook either can’t or won’t do anything about it.”
And even with Trump banned from Facebook, his supporters and right-wing commentators like Dan Bongino continue to dominate the list of top-performing posts on Facebook each day, according todata compiled by New YorkTimesreporter Kevin Roose.
“Facebook continues to allow Steve Bannon to broadcast despite calling for the beheading of a government official and continuing to make claims the 2020 election was fraudulent,” wrote Roger McNamee and Maria Ressa—both members of the alternative board—in acolumnfor TIME on Thursday. “Evidently,” they write, “we should not take Facebook’s commitment to stop hate at face value.”
What’s next for regulating Big Tech
There are no easy answers to questions of how to set binding, democratically-ordained standards for the newly-powerful social media platforms. While Facebook has received lots of criticism for the Oversight Board, no other company has established even a semi-independent body to interrogate and potentially overturn otherwise-unaccountable decisions by powerful executives.
Twitter has approached the problem differently. In a thread days after his company permanently suspended Trump, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he did “not celebrate or feel pride” in the move, and went on to discuss how the events of previous days had increased the imperative to “look at how our service might incentivize distraction and harm.” The thread seemed to acknowledge the broader dynamics of algorithmic amplification—which go well beyond Trump—but his proposed solution raised some eyebrows.
He said Twitter was funding the development of a new “decentralized standard for social media,” that might contribute to a future Internet “that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity.” Called Bluesky, the initiative left several unanswered questions about how the problems of algorithmic amplification and harmful content would be solved. “As a free expression advocate, there’s a lot of positives and benefits to decentralized models,” Emma Llansó, the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s free expression project,told the site Digital Trends. “But there are questions of, if someone posts something illegal, how will law enforcement respond?”
For Schaake and other critics of Big Tech, the only enduring solution is for governments to reclaim the powers of gatekeeping the public square that the tech companies usurped. But that will take time. During that time, projects like Facebook’s Oversight Board will have a chance to win—or lose—public approval.
