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On invit­a­tion from Facebook, ECAJ co-CEO Peter Wertheim (centre) attended con­sulta­tions at the company’s South Beach office in Singapore, together with other rep­res­ent­at­ives from South Korea, The Phil­ip­pines, Japan, Myanmar and Thailand.

ECAJ co-CEO Peter Wertheim travelled to Singapore as the guest of Facebook to attend a two-day con­sulta­tion on February 20 – 21 on the estab­lish­ment of an inde­pend­ent External Oversight Board which it is proposed will be empowered to make final decisions about contested content appearing on Facebook, and will put forward recom­mend­a­tions about Facebook’s community standards, policies and internal processes.  There were a total of 38 par­ti­cipants from across Asia, Australia and New Zealand, including academics, media workers and civil society rep­res­ent­at­ives.   This was the first of a small number of con­sulta­tions which Facebook has scheduled with par­ti­cipants from various regions in the world.

Facebook currently has 23 cat­egor­ies of community standards which may require it to remove a range of content including hate speech, credible threats of violence, terrorist activity, inciting or advoc­at­ing physical harm, bullying and har­ass­ment.  Each day Facebook receives an average of one million noti­fic­a­tions from its 2.3 billion users all over the world reporting content that is said to breach its community standards.   

Facebook currently employs 30,000 people to deal with the for­mu­la­tion and enforce­ment of its community standards, half of whom are tasked with reviewing specific com­plaints about content.  The company has also developed, and is con­tinu­ally improving, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to detect and remove pro­hib­ited content elec­tron­ic­ally, regard­less of whether a complaint has been made. Due to vari­ations in language and culture, and dif­fi­culties in assessing precise nuances of meaning, the elec­tron­ic detection of hate speech is espe­cially chal­len­ging.  Nev­er­the­less Facebook has had a growing success rate in dealing with this problem.   

The meeting con­sidered and discussed several real-life case studies.  Par­ti­cipants then debated and put forward recom­mend­a­tions about the precise functions of the External Oversight Board (EOB), the number of EOB members, their term of office, the process for selecting members and the criteria for selection, caseload, criteria for selecting cases to go before the EOB, the processes for assessing and determ­in­ing cases, the trans­par­ency of the EOB’s decisions, main­tain­ing con­sist­ency of decision-making, pro­tec­tions against infringe­ments on the EOB’s inde­pend­ence, indemnity against loss, EOB recom­mend­a­tions about changes to Facebook’s policies and processes, and numerous other questions.

A final decision about all of these matters is expected to be announced by the end of 2019.    

Com­ment­ing on the exper­i­ence, Peter Wertheim said: “This was one of the most chal­len­ging meetings I have attended.  The ECAJ has had its dif­fer­ences with Facebook in the past, so full credit to them for inviting a rep­res­ent­at­ive from the ECAJ to par­ti­cip­ate.  The creation of an External Oversight Board is a hugely complex and ambitious under­tak­ing and I commend Facebook for the ini­ti­at­ive.  A final judgment about the proposal will have to await the decisions which are ulti­mately made about the range of matters we discussed.  However, I would like to think Facebook is doing this for the right reasons and  that it  has matured in its outlook, has a clear view of its moral and legal respons­ib­il­it­ies about prob­lem­at­ic­al content and takes those respons­ib­il­it­ies very seriously. The ECAJ looks forward to our expect­a­tions being confirmed and exceeded”.

Contact
Peter Wertheim AM | co-CEO
ph: 02 8353 8500 | m: 0408 160 904 | fax 02 9361 5888
e: [email protected] | www.ecaj.org.au