Facebook Pledges $130 Million to Fund Supreme Court for Content
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 boards budget and administration.
The money marks a significant investment in an organization that doesnt yet exist, but could take on responsibility for some of the companys thorniest decisions.
In recent years, Facebook has been beset by public controversies over how it handles misinformation, hate speech and graphic content.
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.
Sometimes dubbed Facebooks Supreme Court, the board will function like an appeals court, with five-person panels adjudicating controversies arising from Facebooks 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 review board has been in the works since last year, when Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote that despite his optimism about the companys role in society, without sufficient safeguards, people will misuse these tools to interfere in elections, spread misinformation, and incite violence.
That they even sought out this report means its one of the founding documents the board can go back to, said Ms. Klonick of Facebook.
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