Facebook Founds its "Oversight Board"

In November 2018 Facebook established the concept of its international Oversight Board in cyberspace, and eventually publicized it at www.oversightboard.com. When I created this entry in January 2021 the board, which had been independently endowed by Facebook, and paid each member a substantial annual salary, had begun to receive news media coverage in its responsibility to decide whether Donald Trump, who Facebook had banned from its platform after the January 6, 2021 assault on the capital by Trump supporters, should be permanently banned or eventually reinstated to the platform. During Trump's presidency, according to the Washington Post, Trump talled 30,534 false statements, and promoted numerous conspiracy theories . It was widely understood by analysts of Trump's impact of U.S. politics that Trump's domination of social media via Facebook, Twitter, and possibly other social media platforms, in addition to traditional news media, was a major souce of his continuing influence over millions of U.S. voters.

On January 25, 2021, when I wrote this entry, the Oversight Board published this statement on its website:

"As its community grew to more than 2 billion people, it became increasingly clear to the Facebook company that it shouldn’t be making so many decisions about speech and online safety on its own. The Oversight Board was created to help Facebook answer some of the most difficult questions around freedom of expression online: what to take down, what to leave up, and why.

"The board uses its independent judgment to support people’s right to free expression and ensure those rights are being adequately respected. The board’s decisions to uphold or reverse Facebook’s content decisions will be binding, meaning Facebook will have to implement them, unless doing so could violate the law."