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Accept: The Facebook supervisory committee works

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Seen press releases fill my inbox and tweets clear up my timeline, no one is happy with Facebook right now. On Friday, the company issued it his answer Facebook’s oversight committee on recommendations for Donald Trump’s indefinite ban. We learned that Trump’s account has been frozen for two years now since its original January 7 suspension date, at which point Facebook will assess the risks of leaving again. The answer also includes some other policy changes. It is a nonsense to call opinions on the ad “theater of responsibility”Ra suggest that he is cowardly and irresponsible. Republicans, of course, are angry that Trump has not re-entered.

I confess that I found it in another camp. The Supervisory Committee plays a valuable role, albeit a very limited one, and shows why the Trump situation.

When the commission first published the resolution last month, it issued a binding order — Facebook had to take specific action on Donald Trump’s account and could not continue with an indefinite break — and unrelated recommendations, especially since the platform suspended its policy of handling statements. politicians are inherently “new” and therefore exempt from the rules that apply to everyone else. Like me he wrote at the time, Facebook’s response to the unrelated portion would probably have been more important. It would be applied more broadly than Trump’s account, and would also show whether the company is willing to follow the advice of the Supervisory Board.

We now know that the answer to that last question is yes. In an announcement on Friday, Facebook says it is committed to fully following 15 of the 19 unrelated recommendations. Of the remaining four, one is being discarded, partially after the other, and two more investigations are underway.

The most interesting commitments are about the “novelty allowance”. Facebook means that it will keep the exception to its own devices, which will allow it to maintain some content that violates its Community Rules, “if it is new or relevant to the public interest.” The difference is that the platform will no longer treat politicians ’messages in a more meaningful way than anyone else’s messages. Transparency is also increasing by creating a page explaining the rule; from next year, he says, he will publish an explanation whenever the exception applies to content that would otherwise be removed.

Let this sink for a moment: Facebook received specific opinions from a group of sharp critics, and Mark Zuckerberg signed a specific policy change, as well as greater transparency. This is progress!

Now, please do not confuse this for full protection. There’s a lot to criticize about Facebook’s ad. With regard to Trump’s ban, while the company has articulated more specific policies to “increase penalties for public figures in times of civil unrest and ongoing violence,” a two-year maximum suspension seems suspicious to potentially allow Trump to re-run as a presidential candidate. And Facebook’s new commitments to transparency leave nothing to be desired. Her new explanation as a bonus to the novelty, for example, Facebook first provides null information about how it defines “relevant news” – a pretty important detail. Perhaps the case-by-case explanations, which began next year, will shed more light, but so far the policy is as transparent as a cloudy toilet window.

In fact, as with any Facebook ad, this will be impossible to fully evaluate until you see how the company continues to practice. In several cases, Facebook has claimed that it is already following the recommendations of the oversight committee. This can strain credibility. For example, in response to the company’s suggestion that global policy and policy requirements depend on global policy enforcement, the company states, “We ensure that content reviewers are supported by regional and language-specific teams, the context is presented in internal language.” And yet, a Reuters research published this week found that messages promoting gay conversion therapy, which bans Facebook rules, continue to dominate Arab countries, “where professionals send millions of followers through verified accounts.” Like content moderation scholar Evelyn Douek puts, with many of his statements “Facebook gives itself a gold star, but it’s really borderline boundaries at best.”

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