By Jeff Horwitz 

This article is being republished as part of our daily reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S. print edition of The Wall Street Journal (December 13, 2019).

Facebook Inc. will pay $130 million to establish an independent board charged with reviewing how the company moderates its content, providing long-term backing to its experiment in better policing the platform.

The money, which Facebook described as an "initial commitment," is meant to cover six years of operations, including salaries for board members, office space and a staff including case managers, lawyers and human resources personnel. A corporate trust managed by financial services firm Brown Brothers Harriman will in turn oversee the board's budget and administration.

The money marks a significant investment in an organization that doesn't yet exist, but could take on responsibility for some of the company's thorniest decisions. In recent years, Facebook has been beset by public controversies over how it handles misinformation, hate speech and graphic content.

Similar controversies have occurred at Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube and Twitter Inc. But Facebook is the first of the social media giants to give an outside organization potentially binding control over how some of them are addressed.

"They're putting their money where their mouth is," said Kate Klonick, an assistant law professor at St. John's University who Facebook allowed to attend some of the internal discussions surrounding the board. "It's a lot of money, it's a long time, and it can't disappear."

Sometimes dubbed "Facebook's Supreme Court," the board will function like an appeals court, with five-person panels adjudicating controversies arising from Facebook's in-house efforts to enforce its content standards. In addition to rendering binding decisions on a case-by-case basis, the board can recommend policy changes to Facebook that the company must publicly address. While Facebook will select the first 11 members of the board, the eleven will choose the remaining board members, with terms lasting three years. The board will select the staff members.

The review board has been in the works since last year, when Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote that despite his optimism about the company's role in society, "without sufficient safeguards, people will misuse these tools to interfere in elections, spread misinformation, and incite violence."

Before launching the board, the company held listening sessions across the globe and produced numerous reports on its plans and feedback. Thursday's funding announcement was paired with news of an additional delay: Facebook says it no longer expects to appoint board members before early next year.

Alongside news of the board's funding and timing, Facebook also released a 60-page report it commissioned from social responsibility consultant BSR. The document, which Facebook said it hoped would influence the board's future actions, is an apparent victory for a coalition of human rights organizations that lobbied Facebook about the board.

The paper recommended that the board consider a wide range of possible harms from content "beyond just freedom of expression" and said the board should justify all of its decisions in terms of United Nations human rights principles. It also said Facebook should provide financial compensation to people harmed by content "in cases when damage can be economically assessed."

"We feel a responsibility and have received feedback that the board should be grounded in human rights principles, including the rights to freedom of expression, privacy and remedy," said Brent Harris, a director of governance at Facebook.

"That they even sought out this report means it's one of the founding documents the board can go back to," said Ms. Klonick of Facebook. "I think the civil society groups have the opportunity to have a leg up more than they have before."

Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 13, 2019 02:47 ET (07:47 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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