The Facebook Oversight Board has been functional for nearly a year since it first started accepting user appeals in Oct 2020. To date, the Board has issued 18 opinions in response to a number of critical issues including COVID disinformation, hate speech, and the deplatforming of political leaders. The Board and its aims are a novel articulation of internet governance. The opinions it has issued thus far have had important implications for global freedom of expression.
The Yale Information Society Project and the Wikimedia Initiative on Intermediaries and Information present a discussion with Professor Kate Klonick on the Facebook Oversight Board a year after its inception. The Board has great potential to set new precedent for user participation in private platforms’ governance and a user right to procedure in content moderation. This discussion on the Board will examine how much of that potential has been met and what challenges still remain.
Kate Klonick is an Assistant Professor at St. John's University Law School and an Affiliate Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Her research on networked technologies' effect on social norm enforcement, freedom of expression, and private governance has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, The New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian and numerous other publications.
