FACEBOOK OVERSIGHT BOARD MEMBERS ANNOUNCED – WILL THEY HAVE ANY POWER?

Commencement of hearing into cases will begin in the next months

 

Some members of the Facebook Oversight Board have been announced recently. It is being hoped that the Board will end the autocracy of Mark Zuckerberg. He has been reigning over the company for 16 years now. But will the Board be able to exercise any power, or would it end up existing for the sake of formality? Let’s find out.

 

The first weird thing about Facebook Oversight Board is that it has been picked by a semi-independent body that was created by Facebook itself. The Board will have 20 members as of now, which will probably increase to 40 over the course of time. It will include several notable journalists, activists and attorneys. Some prominent names include Alan Rusbridger, the former Editor of The Guardian and Tawakkol Karman, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who is also addressed as “Mother of Revolution.”

The members of the Facebook Oversight Board belong to different countries and backgrounds as well. It has a Pakistani lawyer, Nighat Dad and a former U.S. appellate court judge Michael McConnell. Joning them are Catalina Botero-Marino, dean of a prominent law school in Colombia, and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former prime minister of Denmark.

 

Just 25 per cent of the board members are from the U.S. About 20 per cent are from Europe. 15 per cent from the Asia Pacific and Oceania, 10 per cent each from the major subregion of the continents that include the Middle East & North Africa, Central & South Asia, the Latin America & the Caribbean and the Sub-Sharan Africa. Just two members of the Board are programmers.

Some people believe that the Facebook Oversight Board will be a disruptive force when it comes to oft-maligned views of Mark Zuckerberg. It might have some freedom as the members of the Board are not Facebook employees, and the company can’t remove them.

 

But the fact is that the funding of the Board comes from Facebook. Also, the charter of the Facebook Oversight Board states that Facebook has the carte blanche to opt-out of any decision. Facebook will take any action based on the Board’s decision only if the action or the decision is technically and operationally feasible. We all know it means that Facebook can find an excuse not to agree with the boards’ decisions.